Under his care and instructions I remained seven years, reading when it pleased me, for my mother took care that my own will was the only measure of my studies. Nevertheless, I read a great deal; for when I was fatigued by great corporal exercise, the craving of my mind for constant employment always returned, and I sat down with greediness to whatever was presented to me. A good deal of Latin, a very little Greek, an immensity of French, and a certain portion of Italian and Spanish, were thus run through, with, perhaps, little benefit; but the whole system of my studies, if that can be called system which had no regularity, was altered from what it had been when I was at school. It was my tutor's maxim that a man was born to know every thing, and consequently, no expurgated editions were put into my hand. The warmest of the Latin poets, and the least chaste of the French and Italian, were given to me without ceremony; and where I wanted notes or interpretations, my worthy tutor supplied them fully, sometimes in a grave and scientific manner, sometimes laughing till he was ready to fall from his chair. Immense quantities of English also did I read, ancient and modern, good and bad--Milton's purity and Rochester's filth; Southey's inimitable poetry, and the novels of Maria Regina Roche. Four books especially took possession of my imagination, and remain to the present time amongst those in which I can read every day. They were the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Southey's Curse of Kehema. My love for Shakspeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, came at an after period; and towards the age of seventeen, I began to read the romances of Sir Walter Scott--works which were calculated to do my mind the most infinite service, to blend the love of virtue with the spirit of adventure, and tame wild imagination to the uses of the world. Fencing, riding, cudgel-playing, varied the time with mathematics, geometry, and astronomy. History came in for a great portion of my attention, and books of travels maintained their share. Thus did I become one of the most desultory beings that the world ever produced; so that, before I was eighteen years of age, my mind was literally like a pawnbroker's shop, full of an odd assemblage of unconnected things, huddled together in the storehouses of memory, unmarked and disarranged, and difficult to be got at. Many of these stores also were calculated to be injurious to me in various ways; they did prove so, certainly, in some degree; but that they did not become more so, I owe, I believe, to two causes--first, my early fondness for the writings of Southey, where virtue, robed in poetry and eloquence, is splendid enough to catch even imagination; and next, my having fallen in love before I was much exposed to the temptations of the world.