In his twelfth year he entered into a scheme for representing a play in conjunction with his schoolfellows; but instead of seeking his Dramatis Personae among the heroes of Homer, as Pope had done in his boyhood, Jones, by a remarkable effort of memory, committed to paper what he retained of Shakspeare's Tempest, which he had read at his mother's; and himself sustained the part of Prospero in that Comedy. Meanwhile, his poetical faculty did not lie dormant. He turned into English verse all Virgil's Eclogues and several of Ovid's Epistles; and wrote a Tragedy on the fable of Meleager, which was acted during the holidays by himself and his comrades, and in which he sustained the character of the hero. A short specimen of the drama is preserved. The language brings to our recollection that of the Mock Tragedy in Hamlet. When the other boys were at their sports, Jones continued to linger over his book, or, if he mingled in their diversions, his favourite objects were still uppermost in his thoughts; he directed his playmates to divide the fields into compartments to which he gave the names of the several Grecian republics; allotted to each their political station; and "wielding at will the fierce democracies," arranged the complicated concerns of peace and war, attack and defence, councils, harangues, and negociations. Dr. Thackeray was compelled to own that "if his pupil were left naked and friendless on Salisbury plain, he would yet find his way to fame and riches." On the resignation of that master, the management of the school devolved on Dr. Sumner, by whom Jones, then in his fifteenth year, was particularly distinguished. Such was his zeal, that he devoted whole nights to study; and not contented with applying himself at school to the classical languages, and during the vacations to the Italian and French, he attained Hebrew enough to enable him to read the Psalms in the original, and made himself acquainted with the Arabic character. Strangers, who visited Harrow, frequently inquired for him by the appellation of the great scholar. Some of his compositions from this time to his twentieth year, which he collected and entitled Limon,[1] in imitation of the ancients, are printed among his works. A young scholar who should now glance his eye over the first chapter, containing speeches from Shakspeare and Addison's Cato translated into Greek iambics on the model of the Three Tragedians, would put aside the remainder with a smile of complacency at the improvement which has since been made in this species of task under the auspices of Porson.