Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself “in a dismal swamp of barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles.  I got hold of the Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously to reading every one of them.”  One profit of his antiquarianism, however, was, as he says, his attention to foreign languages,—­French, Spanish, German, especially in their earliest and rudest forms of literature.  From these he ascended to the ancient poets, and from Latin to Greek.  He would have taken up the study of the Oriental languages, but for the advice of a relative, who begged him seriously to turn his attention to history.  The paragraph which follows must speak for itself as a true record under a feigned heading.

“The groundwork of my early character was plasticity and fickleness.  I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with my former course of reading.  I now set myself violently to the study of history.  With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to make as gross mistakes in the pursuit of this as of other branches of knowledge.  I imagined, on setting out, a system of strict and impartial investigation of the sources of history.  I was inspired with the absurd ambition, not uncommon to youthful students, of knowing as much as their masters.  I imagined it necessary for me, stripling as I was, to study the authorities; and, imbued with the strict necessity of judging for myself, I turned from the limpid pages of the modern historians to the notes and authorities at the bottom of the page.  These, of course, sent me back to my monastic acquaintances, and I again found myself in such congenial company to a youthful and ardent mind as Florence of Worcester and Simeon of Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and elegant pages of Froissart, Hollinshed, Hooker, and Stowe.  Infant as I was, I presumed to grapple with masses of learning almost beyond the strength of the giants of history.  A spendthrift of my time and labor, I went out of my way to collect materials, and to build for myself, when I should have known that older and abler architects had already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice was built, the quarry exhausted, and that I was, consequently, only delving amidst rubbish.

“This course of study was not absolutely without its advantages.  The mind gained a certain proportion of vigor even by this exercise of its faculties, just as my bodily health would have been improved by transporting the refuse ore of a mine from one pit to another, instead of coining the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes.  Still, however, my time was squandered.  There was a constant want of fitness and concentration of my energies.  My dreams of education were