's "Essay on Projects," from which work impressions were
derived which afterwards influenced some of the principal events of his
life. The lectures of REYNOLDS probably originated in the essays of
Richardson. It is acknowledged that these first made him a painter, and
not long afterwards an author; and it is said that many of the principles
in his lectures may be traced in those first studies. Many were the
indelible and glowing impressions caught by the ardent Reynolds from those
bewildering pages of enthusiasm! Sir WALTER RAWLEIGH, according to a
family tradition, when a young man, was perpetually reading and conversing
on the discoveries of Columbus, and the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro.
His character, as well as the great events of his life, seem to have been
inspired by his favourite histories; to pass beyond the discoveries of the
Spaniards became a passion, and the vision of his life. It is formally
testified that, from a copy of Vegetius _de Re Militari_, in the school
library of St. Paul's, MARLBOROUGH imbibed his passion for a military
life. If he could not understand the text, the prints were, in such a
mind, sufficient to awaken the passion for military glory. ROUSSEAU in
early youth, full of his Plutarch, while he was also devouring the trash
of romances, could only conceive human nature in the colossal forms, or be
affected by the infirm sensibility of an imagination mastering all his
faculties; thinking like a Roman, and feeling like a Sybarite. The same
circumstance happened to CATHERINE MACAULEY, who herself has told us how
she owed the bent of her character to the early reading of the Roman
historians; but combining Roman admiration with English faction, she
violated truth in English characters, and exaggerated romance in her
Roman. But the permanent effect of a solitary bias in the youth of genius,
impelling the whole current of his after-life, is strikingly displayed in
the remarkable character of Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, the author of the
famous "Confessional," and the curious "Memoirs of Hollis," written with
such a republican fierceness.

I had long considered the character of our archdeacon as a _lusus
politicus et theologicus_. Having subscribed to the Articles, and enjoying
the archdeaconry, he was writing against subscription and the whole
hierarchy, with a spirit so irascible and caustic, that one would have
suspected that, like Prynne and Bastwick, the archdeacon had already lost
both his ea