Autobiography | Page 5

cared comparatively little. A voluntary exercise, to which throughout my
boyhood I was much addicted, was what I called writing histories. I successively
composed a Roman History, picked out of Hooke; and an Abridgment of the _Ancient
Universal History_; a History of Holland, from my favourite Watson and from an
anonymous compilation; and in my eleventh and twelfth year I occupied myself with
writing what I flattered myself was something serious. This was no less than a History of
the Roman Government, compiled (with the assistance of Hooke) from Livy and
Dionysius: of which I wrote as much as would have made an octavo volume, extending to
the epoch of the Licinian Laws. It was, in fact, an account of the struggles between the
patricians and plebeians, which now engrossed all the interest in my mind which I had
previously felt in the mere wars and conquests of the Romans. I discussed all the
constitutional points as they arose: though quite ignorant of Niebuhr's researches, I, by
such lights as my father had given me, vindicated the Agrarian Laws on the evidence of
Livy, and upheld, to the best of my ability, the Roman Democratic party. A few years
later, in my contempt of my childish efforts, I destroyed all these papers, not then
anticipating that I could ever feel any curiosity about my first attempts at writing and
reasoning. My father encouraged me in this useful amusement, though, as I think
judiciously, he never asked to see what I wrote; so that I did not feel that in writing it I

was accountable to any one, nor had the chilling sensation of being under a critical eye.
But though these exercises in history were never a compulsory lesson, there was another
kind of composition which was so, namely, writing verses, and it was one of the most
disagreeable of my tasks. Greek and Latin verses I did not write, nor learnt the prosody of
those languages. My father, thinking this not worth the time it required, contented himself
with making me read aloud to him, and correcting false quantities. I never composed at
all in Greek, even in prose, and but little in Latin. Not that my father could be indifferent
to the value of this practice, in giving a thorough knowledge of these languages, but
because there really was not time for it. The verses I was required to write were English.
When I first read Pope's Homer, I ambitiously attempted to compose something of the
same kind, and achieved as much as one book of a continuation of the Iliad. There,
probably, the spontaneous promptings of my poetical ambition would have stopped; but
the exercise, begun from choice, was continued by command. Conformably to my father's
usual practice of explaining to me, as far as possible, the reasons for what he required me
to do, he gave me, for this, as I well remember, two reasons highly characteristic of him:
one was, that some things could be expressed better and more forcibly in verse than in
prose: this, he said, was a real advantage. The other was, that people in general attached
more value to verse than it deserved, and the power of writing it, was, on this account,
worth acquiring. He generally left me to choose my own subjects, which, as far as I
remember, were mostly addresses to some mythological personage or allegorical
abstraction; but he made me translate into English verse many of Horace's shorter poems:
I also remember his giving me Thomson's Winter to read, and afterwards making me
attempt (without book) to write something myself on the same subject. The verses I wrote
were, of course, the merest rubbish, nor did I ever attain any facility of versification, but
the practice may have been useful in making it easier for me, at a later period, to acquire
readiness of expression.[1] I had read, up to this time, very little English poetry.
Shakspeare my father had put into my hands, chiefly for the sake of the historical plays,
from which, however, I went on to the others. My father never was a great admirer of
Shakspeare, the English idolatry of whom he used to attack with some severity. He cared
little for any English poetry except Milton (for whom he had the highest admiration),
Goldsmith, Burns, and Gray's _Bard_, which he preferred to his Elegy: perhaps I may
add Cowper and Beattie. He had some value for Spenser, and I remember his reading to
me (unlike his usual practice of making me read to him) the first book of the _Fairie
Queene_; but I took little pleasure in it. The poetry of the present century he saw scarcely
any merit in, and I hardly became acquainted with any of it till I was grown