respected my sufferings; and I was allowed, without controul or advice,
to gratify the wanderings of an unripe taste. My indiscriminate appetite
subsided by degrees in the historic line: and since philosophy has
exploded all innate ideas and natural propensities, I must ascribe this
choice to the assiduous perusal of the Universal History, as the octavo
volumes successively appeared. This unequal work, and a treatise of
Hearne, the Ductor historicus, referred and introduced me to the Greek
and Roman historians, to as many at least as were accessible to an
English reader. All that I could find were greedily devoured, from
Littlebury's lame Herodotus, and Spelman's valuable Xenophon, to the
pompous folios of Gordon's Tacitus, and a ragged Procopius of the
beginning of the last century. The cheap acquisition of so much
knowledge confirmed my dislike to the study of languages; and I argued
with Mrs. Porten, that, were I master of Greek and Latin, I must
interpret to myself in English the thoughts of the original, and that
such extemporary versions must be inferior to the elaborate translations
of professed scholars; a silly sophism, which could not easily be
confuted by a person ignorant of any other language than her own. From
the ancient I leaped to the modern world: many crude lumps of Speed,
Rapin, Mezeray, Davila, Machiavel, Father Paul, Bower, &c., I devoured
like so many novels; and I swallowed with the same voracious appetite
the descriptions of India and China, of Mexico and Peru.

My first introduction to the historic scenes, which have since engaged
so many years of my life, must be ascribed to an accident. In the
summer of 1751, I accompanied my father on a visit to Mr. Hoare's, in
Wiltshire; but I was less delighted with the beauties of Stourhead,
than with discovering in the library a common book, the Continuation
of Echard's Roman History, which is indeed executed with more skill
and taste than the previous work. To me the reigns of the successors of
Constantine were absolutely new; and I was immersed in the passage
of the Goths over the Danube, when the summons of the dinner-bell
reluctantly dragged me from my intellectual feast. This transient glance
served rather to irritate than to appease my curiosity; and as soon as
I returned to Bath I procured the second and third volumes of Howel's
History of the World, which exhibit the Byzantine period on a larger
scale. Mahomet and his Saracens soon fixed my atten