Even the steps of time are retraced, and we resume the possessions we seemed to have lost; for in advanced life a return to our early studies refreshes and renovates the spirits: we open the poets who made us enthusiasts, and the philosophers who taught us to think, with a new source of feeling acquired by our own experience. ADAM SMITH confessed his satisfaction at this pleasure to Professor Dugald Stewart, while "he was reperusing, with the enthusiasm of a student, the tragic poets of ancient Greece, and Sophocles and Euripides lay open on his table." Dans ses veines toujours un jeune sang bouillone, Et Sophocle a cent ans peint encore Antigone. The calm philosophic Hume found that death only could interrupt the keen pleasure he was again receiving from Lucian, inspiring at the moment a humorous self-dialogue with Charon. "Happily," said this philosopher, "on retiring from the world I found my taste for reading return, even with greater avidity." We find GIBBON, after the close of his History, returning with an appetite as keen to "a full repast on Homer and Aristophanes, and involving himself in the philosophic maze of the writings of Plato." Lord WOODHOUSELEE found the recomposition of his "Lectures on History" so fascinating in the last period of his life, that Mr. Alison informs us, "it rewarded him with that _peculiar delight_, which has been often observed in the later years of literary men; the delight of returning again to the studies of their youth, and of feeling under the snows of age the cheerful memories of their spring."[A] [Footnote A: There is an interesting chapter on Favourite Authors in "Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii., to which the reader may be referred for other examples.--ED.]