ory of a life. It may sometimes almost be regarded in the light of a
new birth.

From the day when James Edward Smith was presented with his first
botanical lesson-book, and Sir Joseph Banks fell in with Gerard's
'Herbal'--from the time when Alfieri first read Plutarch, and Schiller
made his first acquaintance with Shakspeare, and Gibbon devoured the
first volume of 'The Universal History'--each dated an inspiration so
exalted, that they felt as if their real lives had only then begun.

In the earlier part of his youth, La Fontaine was distinguished for
his idleness, but hearing an ode by Malherbe read, he is said to have
exclaimed, "I too am a poet," and his genius was awakened. Charles
Bossuet's mind was first fired to study by reading, at an early
age, Fontenelle's 'Eloges' of men of science. Another work of
Fontenelle's--'On the Plurality of Worlds'--influenced the mind of
Lalande in making choice of a profession. "It is with pleasure," says
Lalande himself in a preface to the book, which he afterwards edited,
"that I acknowledge my obligation to it for that devouring activity
which its perusal first excited in me at the age of sixteen, and which I
have since retained."

In like manner, Lacepede was directed to the study of natural history
by the perusal of Buffon's 'Histoire Naturelle,' which he found in his
father's library, and read over and over again until he almost knew it
by heart. Goethe was greatly influenced by the reading of Goldsmith's
'Vicar of Wakefield,' just at the critical moment of his mental
development; and he attributed to it much of his best education. The
reading of a prose 'Life of Gotz vou Berlichingen' afterwards stimulated
him to delineate his character in a poetic form. "The figure of a rude,
well-meaning self-helper," he said, "in a wild anarchic time, excited my
deepest sympathy."

Keats was an insatiable reader when a boy; but it was the perusal of the
'Faerie Queen,' at the age of seventeen, that first lit the fire of his
genius. The same poem is also said to have been the inspirer of Cowley,
who found a copy of it accidentally lying on the window of his mother's
apartment; and reading and admiring it, he became, as he relates,
irrecoverably a poet.

Coleridge speaks of the great influence which the poems of Bowles had in
forming his own mind. The works of a past age, says he, seem to a young
man to be things of another race; but the writings of a contemporary
"possess a reality