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tutors and in all the other details of my training, in which he insisted upon certain peculiar methods contrary to the usage of colleges; but for all that, it was still a college. My Latin was corrupted forthwith, and since then, by unaccustomedness, I have entirely lost the use of it; and my unusual education was of no service to me except that it enabled me at the beginning to skip over the lower classes. For when I left the college, at thirteen, I had finished my course (as they call it), and in truth without any benefit that I can now put my hand on.

The first relish that I had for books came to me from pleasure in the fables of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For, at the age of about seven or eight, I stole away from every other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as their language was my mother-tongue, and it was the best suited, because of the subject, to my age, that I knew. For as to the Lancelots du Lac, (b) the Amadis, (a) the Huons de Bordeaux, and heaps of such trashy books on which childhood wastes its time, I did not even know their names, nor do I yet know their contents, so strict was the care given to my education. I became in consequence more indifferent to the study of my other prescribed lessons. It then happened to me most opportunely to have to do with a man of intelligence as a tutor, who dexterously connived at this irregularity of mine and others of the same sort. For thus I ran through, in quick succession, Virgil, in the Æneid, and then Terence, and then Plautus, and Italian comedies, enticed always by the charm of the subject. If he had been so foolish as to interrupt that course, I believe that I should have brought away from the college only a detestation of books, as almost all our gentry do. He managed in this matter ingeniously, pretending to see nothing of it; he sharpened my appetite by allowing me only by stealth those books, and gently keeping me to my duty in the other regular studies. For the principal qualities that my father sought in those to whom he gave me in charge were friendliness and natural approachableness;^[1] as my nature had no other fault than inertness and idleness. The danger was, not that I should do wrong, but that I should do nothing. No one prophesied that I should become