Rising at three, or four at the latest, he read history, or the grammar of some language, or engaged in translation till seven, when he sat down to his stall. At meal-times he attempted the double task of taking in food for the body and the mind at the same time, cutting up his food and eating it with a spoon that he might not have occasion to take his eyes off the book he held in his hand; at work till eight or nine, he was all the while committing to memory and reciting aloud passages from the poets, or declensions and conjugations, or rules of syntax; and when he rose from his stool, it was only to pace the room, while he still went on with his studies, until at last he dropped into bed utterly exhausted. This was his method in spring and summer, but even in winter his hours were just as long, and study in the early morning was not accompanied by the invigorating influence of walking exercise and fresh air; for he says, "When in the coldness of winter we could not afford to have a fire till my mother rose, I used to put a lamp on a stool, which I placed on a little round table, and standing before it wrapped up in my mother's old red cloak, I read on till seven, or studied a grammar or my Euclid, and frequently kept my feet moving to secure warmth or prevent myself from falling asleep."[63] In this way Latin was so far mastered that Cæsar's "De Bello Gallico" could be read "page after page with scarcely more than a glance at the dictionary," and the "Eneid" of Virgil became an intellectual love that lasted for life. We have no space to describe the vast amount of historical and miscellaneous reading done at this time. It was surely no small feat for a shoemaker, working hard for twelve or thirteen hours in the day, to go in a few years through Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," Sale's "Preliminary Discourse to his Translation of the Koran," Mosheim's "Church History," all the principal English poets from Shakespeare to Scott and Keats; to read the "Curiosities of Literature," "Calamities" and "Quarrels of Authors," Wharton's "History of Poetry" and Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," Boswell's "Life of Johnson" and Landor's "Imaginary Conversations," Southey's "Book of the Church," and Lingard's "Anglo-Saxon Antiquities," besides a host of books of travel, and quarterly and monthly magazines innumerable. [62] Thomas Miller, afterward known as a poet and novelist, and for his charming descriptions of rural scenery, was an intimate friend of Cooper from childhood to old age. [63] "Life of Thomas Cooper," pp. 60, 61.