Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/718

698 "When I received your letter on Monday, John, who is so desirous to be your inmate, was in the room, and observed me smiling [at Bentham's fun] as I read it. This excited his curiosity to know what it was about. I said it was Mr. Bentham asking us to go to Barrow Green. He desired to read that. I gave it to him to see what he would say, when he began, as if reading—Why have you not come to Barrow Green, and brought John with you?" The letter closes—"John asks if Monday (the day fixed) is not to-morrow." Not much is to be made of this, except that the child's precocious intellect is equal to a bit of waggery. The remark may seem natural, that if he were then learning his Greek cards he might actually have read the letter; but no one that ever saw Bentham's handwriting would make that remark. As I take it, the interest of the scene lies in disclosing a sunny moment in the habitually stern relationship of the father and son.

As an introduction to the next contemporary landmark of his progress, I need to quote from himself the account of his earliest reading. He says nothing of English books till he has first given a long string of Greek authors—Æsop's Fables, the Anabasis, Cyropædia, and Memorabilia of Xenophon, Herodotus, some of Diogenes Laertius, part of Lucian, two speeches of Isocrates; all these seem to have been gone through before his eighth year. His English reading he does not connect with his Greek, but brings up at another stage of his narrative. From 1810 to 1813 (age, four to seven) the family had their residence in Newington Green, and his father took him out in morning walks in the lanes toward Hornsey, and in those walks he gave his father an account of his reading; the books cited being now histories in English—Robertson, Hume, Gibbon, Watson's Philip the Second and Third (his greatest favorite), Hooke's History of Rome (his favorite after Watson), Rollin in English, Langhorne's Plutarch, Burnet's Own Time, the history in the Annual Register; he goes on, after a remark or two, to add Millar on the English Government, Mosheim, McCrie's Knox, a quantity of voyages and travels—Anson, Cook, etc.; Robinson Crusoe, Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Miss Edgeworth's Tales, and Brooke's Fool of Quality. I repeat that all this was within the same four years as the Greek list above enumerated. At a later stage, he speaks of his fondness for writing histories; he successively composed a Roman History from Hooke, an abridgment of the Universal History, a History of Holland, and (in his eleventh and twelfth years) a History of the Roman Government. All these, he says, he destroyed. It happens, however, that a lady friend of the family copied and preserved the first of these essays, the Roman History; upon the copy is marked his age, six and a half years, which would be near the termination of the two formidable courses of reading now summarized. The sketch is very short, equal to between two and three of the present printed pages, and gives but a few scraps of the earlier traditions. If it is wonderful for the writer's age, it also shows that his enormous reading had as yet done