The
house in Herbert Street was well provided with them, and he was allowed
to make free choice. His selection was seldom, if ever, questioned; and
this was well, for he thus drew to himself the mysterious aliment on
which his genius throve. Shakespere, Milton, Pope, and Thomson are
mentioned among the first authors with whom he made acquaintance on
first beginning to read; and "The Castle of Indolence" seems to have
been one of his favorite poems while a boy. He is also known to have
read, before fourteen, more or less of Rousseau's works, and to have
gone through, with great diligence, the whole of "The Newgate Calendar,"
which latter selection excited a good deal of comment among his family
and relatives, but no decisive opposition. A remark of his has come down
from that time, that he cared "very little for the history of the world
before the fourteenth century"; and he had a judicious shyness of what
was considered useful reading. Of the four poets there is of course but
little trace in his works; Rousseau, with his love of nature and
impressive abundance of emotion, seems to stand more directly related to
the future author's development, and "The Newgate Calendar" must have
supplied him with the most weighty suggestions for those deep ponderings
on sin and crime which almost from the first tinged the pellucid current
of his imagination. There is another book, however, early and familiarly
known to him, which indisputably affected the bent of his genius in an
important degree.
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