study of physical science, in order that he might be able fully to understand and to unfold its relations with history; secondly, he resolved to devote an equal portion of each day to the study of English composition and practice in writing, in order that he might be able to set forth his opinions with force and perspicuity.  To these resolutions he adhered for twelve years.  Every day, after breakfast, he shut himself up for four hours with his experiments and his investigations; and afterwards devoted four hours to analyzing the style of the best English authors, inquiring (as he said) “where it was that I wrote worse than they.”  He studied not only in England, but in Germany and other European countries.  He learned all the languages which he knows (and he knows nearly all I ever heard of) without the aid of a master in any, excepting German, in which he began with a master, but soon dismissed him, because he hindered more than he helped.  He read Hebrew with a Jewish rabbi, but that was after he had learned the language.  He considers the knowledge of languages valuable only as the stepping-stone to other learning, and spoke with contempt of a person in Egypt who was mentioned to him as speaking eight languages familiarly.

“Has he done anything?”

“No.”

“Then he is only fit to be a courier.”

Buckle is not a university-man, although both his father and grandfather were educated at Cambridge.

He has long since abandoned the practice of writing at night, and now does not put pen to paper after three o’clock in the afternoon.  When at home, in London, he walks every day, for about an hour and a half, at noon; frequently dines out and reads perhaps an hour after coming home.  He goes exclusively to dinner-parties, because they take less time than others.  When he is engaged in composition, he walks about the room, sometimes excitedly, his mind engrossed with his subject, until he has composed an entire paragraph, when he sits down and writes it, never retouching, nor composing sentence by sentence, which he thinks has a tendency to give an abrupt and jerky effect to what is written.  Traces of this, he thinks, may be found in Macaulay’s style.

Mr. Thayer showed him the little stock of books he happened to have with him at Cairo.  Mr. Buckle looked them over with interest, expressing his opinions upon them.  One of them, Mr. Bayle St. John’s little book on the Turkish question, he borrowed, although he said that he denied himself all reading on this journey, undertaken for mental rest, and had brought no books with him.  We got upon the inevitable subject of international copyright, which he discussed in a spirit of remarkable candor.  His own experience was this:  that the Messrs. Appleton reprinted his first volume without compensation, asking him to furnish materials for a prefatory memoir, of which request he took no notice; afterwards, when the second volume was published, they sent him something, I believe fifty pounds.  In due course of time, receiving a request from Theodore Parker to that effect, he wrote a letter to aid him in the preparation of a memoir for the Messrs. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia.[B]