Throughout childhood and adolescence, Fiske was confident of his abilities and extremely ambitious. Indeed, he was something of a prodigy. By age eight, he had read most of Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, and Pope; by thirteen, he had read all of Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, and Sallust. Fiske was also an accomplished child scholar in mathematics and philosophy. Most prodigious of all was his linguistic ability; as a young man he claimed to understand a total of eighteen languages.
The precocious youth soon proved his mettle in school. In 1855 he entered Betts Academy in Stamford, Connecticut, where he followed a classical course of Latin, Greek, composition, and arithmetic. Two years later, he was graduated from Betts with the highest record of achievement in the school's history. For the next three years, Fiske continued his studies under the direction of a private tutor, the Reverend Henry M. Colleton, in preparation for entrance to Yale. But under Colleton's influence Fiske grew eager to leave Connecticut and avoid the religious orthodoxy of Yale, and, in 1860, he entered Harvard College. Even as a college freshman, Fiske's lifelong precepts had begun to take shape.
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