Autobiography | Page 2

In this period of my father's life there are two things which it is impossible not to be
struck with: one of them unfortunately a very common circumstance, the other a most
uncommon one. The first is, that in his position, with no resource but the precarious one
of writing in periodicals, he married and had a large family; conduct than which nothing
could be more opposed, both as a matter of good sense and of duty, to the opinions which,
at least at a later period of life, he strenuously upheld. The other circumstance, is the
extraordinary energy which was required to lead the life he led, with the disadvantages
under which he laboured from the first, and with those which he brought upon himself by
his marriage. It would have been no small thing, had he done no more than to support
himself and his family during so many years by writing, without ever being in debt, or in
any pecuniary difficulty; holding, as he did, opinions, both in politics and in religion,
which were more odious to all persons of influence, and to the common run of prosperous
Englishmen, in that generation than either before or since; and being not only a man
whom nothing would have induced to write against his convictions, but one who
invariably threw into everything he wrote, as much of his convictions as he thought the
circumstances would in any way permit: being, it must also be said, one who never did
anything negligently; never undertook any task, literary or other, on which he did not
conscientiously bestow all the labour necessary for performing it adequately. But he, with
these burdens on him, planned, commenced, and completed, the _History of India_; and
this in the course of about ten years, a shorter time than has been occupied (even by
writers who had no other employment) in the production of almost any other historical
work of equal bulk, and of anything approaching to the same amount of reading and
research. And to this is to be added, that during the whole period, a considerable part of
almost every day was employed in the instruction of his children: in the case of one of
whom, myself, he exerted an amount of labour, care, and perseverance rarely, if ever,
employed for a similar purpose, in endeavouring to give, according to his own conception,
the highest order of intellectual education.
A man who, in his own practice, so vigorously acted up to the principle of losing no time,
was likely to adhere to the same rule in the instruction of his pupil. I have no
remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek; I have been told that it was when I
was three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject, is that of committing to
memory what my father termed vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their
signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some
years later, I learnt no more than the inflections of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course
of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly remember going through
Aesop's _Fables_, the first Greek book which I read. The _Anabasis_, which I remember
better, was the second. I learnt no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had read,
under my father's tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the
whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's Cyropaedia and _Memorials of Socrates_; some
of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates ad
Demonicum and Ad Nicoclem. I also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the
common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron to the Theoctetus inclusive: which
last dialogue, I venture to think, would have been better omitted, as it was totally
impossible I should understand it. But my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not

only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done. What
he was himself willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction, may be judged from the
fact, that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in the same
room and at the same table at which he was writing: and as in those days Greek and
English lexicons were not, and I could make no more use of a Greek and Latin lexicon
than could be made without having yet begun to learn Latin, I was forced to have
recourse to him for the meaning of every word which I did not know. This incessant
interruption, he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote under that
interruption several volumes