g.... I was forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of
every word which I did not know. This incessant interruption, he, one
of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote under that
interruption several volumes of his History and all else that he had
to write during those years."

But this does not tell the whole story. Fearing that the Greek might
be too heavy and concentrated a food for the tender intellect of his
child, the considerate father added a diet of English history and
biography. The boy carefully studied and made notes upon Robertson,
Hume, Gibbon, Watson, Hooke, Langhorne's _Plutarch_, Burnet's _History
of His Own Time_, Millar's _Historical View of the English
Government_, Mosheim's _Ecclesiastical History_. In biography and
travel he read the life of Knox, the histories of the Quakers,
Beaver's _Africa_, Collin's _New South Wales_, Anson's _Voyages_, and
Hawkesworth's _Voyages Round the World_. "Of children's books, any
more than of playthings, I had scarcely any, except an occasional
gift from a relation or acquaintance.... It was no part, however, of
my father's system to exclude books of amusement, though he allowed
them very sparingly. Of such books he possessed at that time next to
none, but he borrowed several for me; those which I remember are the
_Arabian Nights_, Cazotte's _Arabian Tales_, _Don Quixote_, Miss
Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_, and a book of some reputation in its day,
Brooke's _Fool of Quality_."

All this, it is to be remembered, was done by a boy who was not beyond
his eighth year. In his eighth year he began Latin, not only as a
learner but as a teacher. It was his duty to teach the younger
children of the family what he had learned. This practice he does not
recommend. "The teaching, I am sure, is very inefficient as teaching,
and I well know that the relation between teacher and taught is not a
good moral discipline to either." By the time this prodigy of
intellect and industry reached the age of fourteen he had studied the
following formidable list: Virgil, Horace, Phaedrus, Livy, Sallust,
the Metamorphoses, Terence, Cicero, Homer, Thucydides, the Hellenica,
Demosthenes, AEschines, Lysias, Theocritus, Anacreon, Aristotle's
Rhetoric; Euclid, Algebra, the higher mathematics, Joyce's Scientific
Dialogues, and various treatises on Chemistry; and in addition to all
this he had read parts of other Greek and Latin authors, and much of
English poetry and history.

A b