Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/364

350 publications had awakened a taste for reading, which he gratified by all available means. Beaumont and Fletcher were read through before he was eight years old; he had also made himself familiar with some of the plays of Shakespeare, and the discrepancy between them, and the history of the times they treated of, was a grievous puzzle to him.

During one of his holidays, a friend made him a present of Hoole's translation of "Tasso." The book touched a nerve in his organization that had till then been dormant, and the remembrance of the gratification its pages afforded, endured through all his after life. The book was carefully preserved. "Forty years," said he, writing in 1823, "have tarnished the gilding upon its back, but they have not effaced my remembrance of the joy with which I received it, and the delight I found in its perusal." Tasso, Ariosto, Spenser, Mickle's "Lusiad," Pope's "Homer," Josephus, Sidney's "Arcadia," and Rowley were diligently read. His father's library was limited, a small cupboard held all his books and his wine-glasses; but during the holidays, the boy had the run of a circulating library in the town comprising a few hundred volumes, and among them he revelled.

He had projected and commenced both tragedies and epic poems, before he was ten years of age, and was surprised that his schoolfellows should experience any difficulty in providing appropriate dialogue if he furnished the plot and characters. "It is the easiest thing in the world," said he, "to write a play, for you know you have only to think what you would say if you were in the place of the characters, and to make them say it." He was sensitive, however, of his fame, and some of his pieces having been discovered and read at his aunt's, he invented a cypher; but becoming unable to solve his own hieroglyphics, burnt his manuscripts in vexation.

In February, 1788, he went to Westminster, but not