work of equal bulk, and of anything approaching to the same amount of
reading and research. And to this is to be added, that during the
whole period, a considerable part of almost every day was employed in
the instruction of his children: in the case of one of whom, myself,
he exerted an amount of labour, care, and perseverance rarely, if
ever, employed for a similar purpose, in endeavouring to give,
according to his own conception, the highest order of intellectual
education.
A man who, in his own practice, so vigorously acted up to the
principle of losing no time, was likely to adhere to the same rule
in the instruction of his pupil. I have no remembrance of the time
when I began to learn Greek; I have been told that it was when I was
three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject, is that of
committing to memory what my father termed vocables, being lists of
common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he
wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some years later, I
learnt no more than the inflections of the nouns and verbs, but, after
a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly
remember going through Aesop's _Fables_, the first Greek book which
I read. The _Anabasis_, which I remember better, was the second. I
learnt no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had read, under
my father's tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I
remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's _Cyropaedia_ and
_Memorials of Socrates_; some of the lives of the philosophers by
Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates ad Demonicum and Ad
Nicoclem. I also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the common
arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron to the Theoctetus inclusive:
which last dialogue, I venture to think, would have been better omitted,
as it was totally impossible I should understand it. But my father, in
all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do,
but much that I could by no possibility have done. What he was himself
willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction, may be judged from
the fact, that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek
lessons in the same room and at the same table at which he was writing:
and as in those days Greek and English lexicons were not, and I could
make no more use of a Greek and Latin lexicon than could be made without
having yet begun to learn Latin, I was forced to have recourse to him
for the meaning of every word which I did not know. This incessant
interruption, he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and
wrote under that interruption several volumes of his History and all
else that he had to write during those years.