his
_whole_ time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive memory, and the
quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those last months
have exhausted the school--library, which consisted principally of
abridgments of all the voyages and travels of any note; Mayor's
Collection; also his Universal History; Robertson's Histories of
Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss Edgeworth's
productions; together with many other works, equally well calculated for
youth, not necessary to be enumerated. The books, however, that were
his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke's "Pantheon,"
Lempriere's "Classical Dictionary," which he appeared to _learn_, and
Spence's "Polymetis." This was the store whence he acquired his perfect
intimacy with the Greek mythology; here was he "suckled In that creed
outworn"; for his amount of classical attainment extended no farther
than the "Aeneid"; with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated, that
before leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a
considerable portion. And yet I remember that at that early age,--mayhap
under fourteen,--notwithstanding and through all its incidental
attractiveness, he hazarded the opinion to me that there was feebleness
in the structure of the work. He must have gone through all the better
publications in the school-library, for he asked me to lend him some of
my own books; and I think I now see him at supper, (we had all our meals
in the school-room,) sitting back on the form, and holding the folio
volume of Burnet's "History of his own Time" between himself and the
table, eating his meal from beyond it. This work, and Leigh Hunt's
"Examiner" newspaper,--which my father took in, and I used to lend to
Keats,--I make no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and
religious liberty. He once told me, smiling, that one of his guardians,
being informed what books I had lent him to read, declared, that, if he
had fifty children, he would not send one of them to my father's school.

When he left us,--I think at fourteen years of age,--he was apprenticed
to Mr. Thomas Hammond, a medical man, residing in Church Street,
Edmonton, and exactly two miles from Enfield. This arrangement appeared
to give him satisfaction; and I fear that it was the most placid period
of his painful life; for now, with the exception of the duty he had to
perform in the surgery, and which was by no means an onerous one, his
whole leisure hou