Thus with me began love and poetry; which at times have been my only, and till within the last twelve months, have been my highest enjoyment. My father struggled on till he reached the freedom in his lease, when he entered on a larger farm, about ten miles farther in the country. The nature of the bargain he made was such as to throw a little ready money into his hands at the commencement of his lease, otherwise the affair would have been impracticable. For four years we lived comfortably here, but a difference commencing between him and his landlord as to terms, after three years tossing and whirling in the vortex of litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors of a jail, by a consumption, which, after two years' promises, kindly stepped in, and carried him away, to where the wicked cease from troubling, and where the weary are at rest! It is during the time that we lived on this farm that my little story is most eventful. I was, at the beginning of this period, perhaps the most ungainly awkward boy in the parish--no _solitaire_ was less acquainted with the ways of the world. What I knew of ancient story was gathered from Salmon's and Guthrie's Geographical Grammars; and the ideas I had formed of modern manners, of literature, and criticism, I got from the _Spectator_. These, with Pope's Works, some Plays of Shakespeare, Tull and Dickson on Agriculture, _The Pantheon_, Locke's _Essay on the Human Understanding_, Stackhouse's _History of the Bible_, Justice's _British Gardener's Directory_, Boyle's _Lectures_, Allan Ramsays's Works, Taylor's _Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin_, _A Select Collection of English Songs_, and Hervey's _Meditations_, had formed the whole of my reading. The collection of songs was my _vade mecum_. I pored over them, driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is.