I have already adverted to the exceeding eagerness with which, while at Harrow, he devoured all sorts of learning,--excepting only that which, by the regimen of the school, was prescribed for him. The same rapid and multifarious course of study he pursued during the holidays; and, in order to deduct as little as possible from his hours of exercise, he had given himself the habit, while at home, of reading all dinner-time.[62] In a mind so versatile as his, every novelty, whether serious or light, whether lofty or ludicrous, found a welcome and an echo; and I can easily conceive the glee--as a friend of his once described it to me--with which he brought to her, one evening, a copy of Mother Goose's Tales, which he had bought from a hawker that morning, and read, for the first time, while he dined. I shall now give, from a memorandum-book begun by him this year, the account, as I find it hastily and promiscuously scribbled out, of all the books in various departments of knowledge, which he had already perused at a period of life when few of his school-fellows had yet travelled beyond their _longs_ and _shorts_. The list is, unquestionably, a remarkable one;--and when we recollect that the reader of all these volumes was, at the same time, the possessor of a most retentive memory, it may be doubted whether, among what are called the regularly educated, the contenders for scholastic honours and prizes, there could be found a single one who, at the same age, has possessed any thing like the same stock of useful knowledge. "LIST OF HISTORICAL WRITERS WHOSE WORKS I HAVE PERUSED IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES." _"History of England._--Hume, Rapin, Henry, Smollet, Tindal, Belsham, Bisset, Adolphus, Holinshed, Froissart's Chronicles (belonging properly to France). _"Scotland._--Buchanan, Hector Boethius, both in the Latin. _"Ireland._--Gordon. _"Rome._--Hooke, Decline and Fall by Gibbon, Ancient History by Rollin (including an account of the Carthaginians, &c.), besides Livy, Tacitus, Eutropius, Cornelius Nepos, Julius Cæsar, Arrian. Sallust. "_Greece._--Mitford's Greece, Leland's Philip, Plutarch, Potter's Antiquities, Xenophon, Thucydides, Herodotus. "_France._--Mezeray, Voltaire. "_Spain._--I chiefly derived my knowledge of old Spanish History from a book called the Atlas, now obsolete. The modern history, from the intrigues of Alberoni down to the Prince of Peace, I learned from its connection with European politics. "_Portugal._--From Vertot; as also his account of the Siege of Rhodes,--though the last is his own invention, the real facts being totally different.--So much for his Knights of Malta.