ages which this free course of
study brought with it:--"Mr. Pope," says Spence, "thought himself the
better, in some respects, for not having had a regular education. He
(as he observed in particular) read originally for the sense, whereas
we are taught, for so many years, to read only for words."]

[Footnote 64: Before Chatterton was twelve years old, he wrote a
catalogue, in the same manner as Lord Byron, of the books he had
already read, to the number of seventy. Of these the chief subjects
were history and divinity.]

[Footnote 65: The perfect purity with which the Greeks wrote their own
language, was, with justice, perhaps, attributed by themselves to
their entire abstinence from the study of any other. "If they became
learned," says Ferguson, "it was only by studying what they themselves
had produced."]

[Footnote 66: The only circumstance I know, that bears even remotely
on the subject of this poem, is the following. About a year or two
before the date affixed to it, he wrote to his mother, from Harrow (as
I have been told by a person to whom Mrs. Byron herself communicated
the circumstance), to say, that he had lately had a good deal of
uneasiness on account of a young woman, whom he knew to have been a
favourite of his late friend, Curzon, and who, finding herself, after
his death, in a state of progress towards maternity, had declared Lord
Byron was the father of her child. This, he positively assured his
mother, was not the case; but, believing, as he did firmly, that the
child belonged to Curzon, it was his wish that it should be brought up
with all possible care, and he, therefore, entreated that his mother
would have the kindness to take charge of it. Though such a request
might well (as my informant expresses it) have discomposed a temper
more mild than Mrs. Byron's, she notwithstanding answered her son in
the kindest terms, saying that she would willingly receive the child
as soon as it was born, and bring it up in whatever manner he desired.
Happily, however, the infant died almost immediately, and was thus
spared the being a tax on the good nature of any body.]

[Footnote 67: In this practice of dating his juvenile poems he
followed the example of Milton, who (says Johnson), "by affixing the
dates to his first compositions, a boast of which the learned Politian
had given him an example, seems to commend the earliness of his own
compositions to the notice of posterity."

The following trifle, writ