the marks on his books he must have often failed to trust his memory for the meanings of the most ordinary Greek words.  To the well-known passage in Childe Harold on Soracte and the “Latian echoes” he appends a prose comment, which preserves its interest as hearing on recent educational controversies:—­“I wish to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote, before we get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of composition, which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish or to reason upon....  In some parts of the continent young persons are taught from common authors, and do not read the best classics till their maturity.”

Comparatively slight stress was then laid on modern languages.  Byron learnt to read French with fluency, as he certainly made himself familiar with the great works of the eighteenth century; but he spoke it with so little ease or accuracy that the fact was always a stumbling-block to his meeting Frenchmen abroad.  Of German he had a mere smattering.  Italian was the only language, besides his own, of which he was ever a master.  But the extent and variety of his general reading was remarkable.  His list of books, drawn up in 1807, includes more history and biography than most men of education read during a long life; a fair load of philosophy; the poets en masse; among orators, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Parliamentary debates from the Revolution to the year 1742; pretty copious divinity, including Blair, Tillotson, Hooker, with the characteristic addition—­“all very tiresome.  I abhor books of religion, though I reverence and love my God without the blasphemous notions of sectaries.”  Lastly, under the head of “Miscellanies” we have Spectator, Rambler, World, &c., &c; among novels, the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie, Sterne, Rabelais, and Rousseau.  He recommends Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy as the best storehouse for second-hand quotations, as Sterne and others have found it, and tells us that the great part of the books named were perused before the age of fifteen.  Making allowance for the fact that most of the poet’s autobiographic sketches are emphatically "Dichtang und Wahrheit," we can believe that he was an omnivorous reader—­“I read eating, read in bed, read when no one else reads”—­and, having a memory only less retentive than Macaulay’s, acquired so much general information as to be suspected of picking it up from Reviews.  He himself declares that he never read a Review till he was eighteen years old—­when, he himself wrote one, utterly worthless, on Wordsworth.