At home he was on very short allowance of books. His father read nothing but the _Bristol Journal_. A small glass cupboard in the back parlour, fastened up against the wall, was sufficient to hold the wine-glasses and all the library. But in the holidays he gets back again to Bath, and to Bull's circulating library. He meets, at his aunt's, people who talk about authors--even sees an author or two--learns that they are greater personages even than the players. In one of these holidays a lady gives him a copy of Hoole's translation of the _Jerusalem Delivered_. This led him into a new course of poetical reading; it converted the budding dramatist into an epic poet. The _Tasso_ introduced him to the translation of the _Orlando Furioso_, and this to Spenser's _Fairy Queen_. How he read, how he revelled in these books! "The copy of Hoole's version (of Tasso) which Mrs Dolignon sent me, is now," he says, "in my sight upon the shelf, and in excellent preservation, considering that when a schoolboy I perused it so often that I had no small portion of it by heart. Forty years have tarnished the gilding upon its back, but they have not effaced my remembrance of the joy with which I received it, and the delight which I found in its repeated perusal.... Hoole, in his notes, frequently referred to the _Orlando Furioso_. I saw some volumes thus lettered, on Bull's counter, and my heart leaped for joy. They proved to be the original; but the shopman, Mr Cruett, (a most obliging man he was,) immediately put the translation into my hands; and I do not think any accession of fortune could now give me so much delight as I then derived from that vile version of Hoole's. There, in the notes, I first saw the name of Spenser, and some stanzas of the _Fairy Queen_. Accordingly, when I returned the last volume, I asked if that work was in the library. My friend Cruett replied that they had it, but it was written in old English, and I should not be able to understand it. This did not appear to me so much a necessary consequence as he supposed, and I therefore requested he would let me look at it. It was the quarto edition of '17, in three volumes, with large prints folded in the middle, equally worthless (like all the prints of that age) in design and execution. There was nothing in the language to impede, for the ear set me right where the uncouth spelling (orthography it cannot be called) might have puzzled the eye; and the few words which are really obsolete were sufficiently explained by the context. No young lady of the present generation falls to a new novel of Sir Walter Scott's with keener relish than I did that morning to the _Fairy Queen_."--(Vol. i. p. 83.)