heroes whose picturesque robberies were the glory of their sober and respectable descendants. Two or three old books which lay in the window-seat were explored for his amusement in the dreary winter days. Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, a mutilated copy of Josephus, and Pope's translation of the Iliad appear to have been his favorites, until, when about eight years old, a happy chance threw him under the spell of the two great poets who have swayed most powerfully the pliant imaginations of the young. "I found," he writes in his early memoirs, "within my mother's dressing-room (where I slept at one time) some odd volumes of Shakespeare; nor can I easily forget the rapture with which I sate up in my shirt reading them by the light of a fire in her apartment, until the bustle of the family rising from supper warned me it was time to creep back to my bed, where I was supposed to have been safely deposited since nine o'clock." And a little later he adds, "Spenser I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights, and ladies, and dragons, and giants in their outward and exoteric sense,
