Autobiography | Page 4

lessons of my pupils, in almost as
full a sense as for my own: I, however, derived from this discipline the great advantage,
of learning more thoroughly and retaining more lastingly the things which I was set to
teach: perhaps, too, the practice it afforded in explaining difficulties to others, may even
at that age have been useful. In other respects, the experience of my boyhood is not
favourable to the plan of teaching children by means of one another. The teaching, I am
sure, is very inefficient as teaching, and I well know that the relation between teacher and
taught is not a good moral discipline to either. I went in this manner through the Latin
grammar, and a considerable part of Cornelius Nepos and Caesar's Commentaries, but
afterwards added to the superintendence of these lessons, much longer ones of my own.
In the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek
poets with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's
translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became
one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it
from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worth while to mention a
taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen
enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with
boys, as I should have expected both a priori and from my individual experience. Soon
after this time I commenced Euclid, and somewhat later, Algebra, still under my father's
tuition.
From my eighth to my twelfth year, the Latin books which I remember reading were, the
Bucolics of Virgil, and the first six books of the Aeneid; all Horace, except the Epodes;
the Fables of Phaedrus; the first five books of Livy (to which from my love of the subject
I voluntarily added, in my hours of leisure, the remainder of the first decade); all Sallust;
a considerable part of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_; some plays of Terence; two or three
books of Lucretius; several of the Orations of Cicero, and of his writings on oratory; also
his letters to Atticus, my father taking the trouble to translate to me from the French the

historical explanations in Mingault's notes. In Greek I read the Iliad and Odyssey through;
one or two plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, though by these I profited
little; all Thucydides; the Hellenics of Xenophon; a great part of Demosthenes, Aeschines,
and Lysias; Theocritus; Anacreon; part of the _Anthology_; a little of Dionysius; several
books of Polybius; and lastly Aristotle's _Rhetoric_, which, as the first expressly
scientific treatise on any moral or psychological subject which I had read, and containing
many of the best observations of the ancients on human nature and life, my father made
me study with peculiar care, and throw the matter of it into synoptic tables. During the
same years I learnt elementary geometry and algebra thoroughly, the differential calculus,
and other portions of the higher mathematics far from thoroughly: for my father, not
having kept up this part of his early acquired knowledge, could not spare time to qualify
himself for removing my difficulties, and left me to deal with them, with little other aid
than that of books: while I was continually incurring his displeasure by my inability to
solve difficult problems for which he did not see that I had not the necessary previous
knowledge.
As to my private reading, I can only speak of what I remember. History continued to be
my strongest predilection, and most of all ancient history. Mitford's Greece I read
continually; my father had put me on my guard against the Tory prejudices of this writer,
and his perversions of facts for the whitewashing of despots, and blackening of popular
institutions. These points he discoursed on, exemplifying them from the Greek orators
and historians, with such effect that in reading Mitford my sympathies were always on
the contrary side to those of the author, and I could, to some extent, have argued the point
against him: yet this did not diminish the ever new pleasure with which I read the book.
Roman history, both in my old favourite, Hooke, and in Ferguson, continued to delight
me. A book which, in spite of what is called the dryness of its style, I took great pleasure
in, was the _Ancient Universal History_, through the incessant reading of which, I had
my head full of historical details concerning the obscurest ancient people, while about
modern history, except detached passages, such as the Dutch War of Independence, I
knew and