at home, of reading
all dinner-time.[62] In a mind so versatile as his, every novelty,
whether serious or light, whether lofty or ludicrous, found a welcome
and an echo; and I can easily conceive the glee--as a friend of his
once described it to me--with which he brought to her, one evening, a
copy of Mother Goose's Tales, which he had bought from a hawker that
morning, and read, for the first time, while he dined.

I shall now give, from a memorandum-book begun by him this year, the
account, as I find it hastily and promiscuously scribbled out, of all
the books in various departments of knowledge, which he had already
perused at a period of life when few of his school-fellows had yet
travelled beyond their _longs_ and _shorts_. The list is,
unquestionably, a remarkable one;--and when we recollect that the
reader of all these volumes was, at the same time, the possessor of a
most retentive memory, it may be doubted whether, among what are
called the regularly educated, the contenders for scholastic honours
and prizes, there could be found a single one who, at the same age,
has possessed any thing like the same stock of useful knowledge.

"LIST OF HISTORICAL WRITERS WHOSE WORKS I HAVE PERUSED IN
DIFFERENT LANGUAGES."

_"History of England._--Hume, Rapin, Henry, Smollet, Tindal,
Belsham, Bisset, Adolphus, Holinshed, Froissart's Chronicles
(belonging properly to France).

_"Scotland._--Buchanan, Hector Boethius, both in the Latin.

_"Ireland._--Gordon.

_"Rome._--Hooke, Decline and Fall by Gibbon, Ancient History
by Rollin (including an account of the Carthaginians, &c.),
besides Livy, Tacitus, Eutropius, Cornelius Nepos, Julius
Caesar, Arrian. Sallust.

"_Greece._--Mitford's Greece, Leland's Philip, Plutarch,
Potter's Antiquities, Xenophon, Thucydides, Herodotus.

"_France._--Mezeray, Voltaire.

"_Spain._--I chiefly derived my knowledge of old Spanish
History from a book called the Atlas, now obsolete. The
modern history, from the intrigues of Alberoni down to the
Prince of Peace, I learned from its connection with European
politics.

"_Portugal._--From Vertot; as also his account of the Siege
of Rhodes,--though the last is his own invention, the real
facts being totally different.--So much for his Knights of
Malta.

"_Turkey._--I have read Knolles, Sir Paul Rycaut, and Prince
Cant