Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/731

Rh he gave up the evening to his hardest subjects. Of course this interval should have been devoted to out-of-doors recreation. It is quite true that both father and son were alive to the necessity of walking, and practiced it even to excess; in fact, counted too much upon it as a means of renewing the forces of the brain: their walks were merely a part of their working-day—a hearing and giving of lessons.

What with his own recital in the "Autobiography" and the minuter details in the letter to Sir S. Bentham, and the diary, we have a complete account of his reading and study in every form. The amount is, of course, stupendous for a child. The choice and the sequence of books and subjects suggest various reflections. His beginning Greek at so early an age was no doubt due to his father's strong predilection for the language. What we wonder at most is the order of his reading. Before his eighth year, he had read not merely the easier writers, but six dialogues of Plato (the Theætetus he admits he did not understand). He was only eight when he first read Thucydides, as well as a number of plays. At nine he read parts of Demosthenes; at eleven he read Thucydides the second time. What his reading of Thacydides could be at eight, we may dimly imagine: it could be nothing but an exercise in the Greek language; and the same remark must be applicable to the great mass of his early reading both in Greek and Latin. At Toulouse we find him still reading Virgil, of although five years before he had read the Bucolics and six books the Æneid. Moreover, at Toulouse, his Greek reading was Lucian, a very easy writer whom he had begun before he was eight; the noticeable fact being that he is now taking an interest in the writer's thoughts and able to criticise him. It is apparent enough that his vast early reading was too rapid, and as a consequence superficial. It is noticeable how rare is his avowal of interest in the subjects of the classical books; Lucian is an exception; Quintilian is another. He was set by his father to make an analysis of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Organon, and doubtless his mind was cast for Logic from the first. His inaptitude for the matter of the Greek and Latin poets is unambiguously shown; he read Homer in Greek, but his interest was awakened only by Pope's translation. His readings in the English poets for the most part made no impression upon him whatever. He had a boyish delight in action, battles, heroism, and energy; and, seeing that whatever he felt, he felt intensely, his devotion to that kind of literature was very ardent. But whether from early habits, or from native peculiarity, he had all his life an extraordinary power of rereading books. His first reading merely skimmed the subject; if a book pleased him, and he wished to study it, he read it two or three times, not after an interval, but immediately. I can not but think that in this practice there is a waste of power.

It was impossible for his father to test the adequacy of his study of Greek and Latin works, except in select cases; and hence it must have