very happy. He was allowed at school and in vacations to read what books he liked, and revelled in the works of Fielding and Swift; while "Don Quixote" and "Gil Blas" were choice favourites. Much as he enjoyed these writings, their influence on his mind is not easily to be traced; and he doubtless gained far more inspiration from the extracts from Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, which, at a tender age, his father made him commit to memory.
"Perlegendi sunt Poetæ," is one of the directions laid down by Cicero, for the education of the Orator. For that of the Poet, it seems even more important. An accurate knowledge of some plays of Shakespeare, and a few books of "Paradise Lost," would be as useful in English education, as the daily repetition of Horace and Virgil, and our schools seem at last awakening to this truth.
William Wordsworth was sent to Hawkeshead, in Lancashire, a school founded by Sandys, Archbishop of York, in 1585. There were four head masters in succession while he was there. To one of these, the Rev. William Taylor, he was especially attached. In the "Prelude" he records his feelings on visiting the grave of his honoured teacher, and also his remembrance of the death-bed scene, to which he and some of the other pupils were invited to receive the last words of the dying man.
It was while at this school that the future Laureate first wooed the Muse whose invoked inspiration was hereafter to be to him its own exceeding great reward. "The Summer Vacation," a subject imposed by his master, was his first poem; and at the age of fifteen he, among other boys, was invited to write lines in celebration of the second centenary from the foundation of the school. It is said that the verses he produced were much admired. Their merit is far above the average of school prize poems; and their marked dissimilarity to the poetical productions of his maturer years is very striking.
