When once he could read, thenceforward his mother gave him regular morning lessons in Bible-reading and in reciting the Scotch paraphrases of the Psalms and other verse, which for his good memory was an easy task.  He made rhymes before he could write them, of course.

At five he was a bookworm, and the books he read fixed him in certain grooves of thought, or, rather, say they were chosen as favourites from an especial interest in their subjects—­an interest which arose from his character of mind, and displayed it.  But with all this precocity, he was no milksop or weakling; he was a bright, active lad, full of fun and pranks, not without companions, though solitary when at home, and kept precisely, in the hope of guarding him from every danger.  He was so little afraid of animals—­a great test of a child’s nerves—­that about this time he must needs meddle with their fierce Newfoundland dog, Lion, which bit him in the mouth, and spoiled his looks.  Another time he showed some address in extricating himself from the water-butt—­a common child-trap.  He did not fear ghosts or thunder; instead of that, his early-developed landscape feeling showed itself in dread of foxglove dells and dark pools of water, in coiling roots of trees—­things that to the average English fancy have no significance whatever.

At seven he began to imitate the books he was reading, to write books himself.  He had found out how to print, as children do; and it was his ambition to make real books, with title-pages and illustrations, not only books, indeed, but sets of volumes, a complete library of his whole works.  But in a letter of March 4, 1829, his mother says to his father:  “If you think of writing John, would you impress on him the propriety of not beginning too eagerly and becoming careless towards the end of his works, as he calls them?  I think in a letter from you it would have great weight.  He is never idle, and he is even uncommonly persevering for a child of his age; but he often spoils a good beginning by not taking the trouble to think, and concluding in a hurry.”

The first of these sets was imitated in style from Miss Edgeworth; he called it, “Harry and Lucy Concluded; or, Early Lessons.”  Didactic he was from the beginning.  It was to be in four volumes, uniform in red leather, with proper title, frontispiece, and “copper-plates,” “printed and composed by a little boy, and also drawn.”  It was begun in 1826, and continued at intervals until 1829.  It was all done laboriously in imitation of print, and, to complete the illusion, contained a page of errata.  This great work was, of course, never completed, though he laboured through three volumes; but when he tired of it, he would turn his book upside down, and begin at the other end with other matters; so that the red books contain all sorts of notes on his minerals and travels, reports of sermons, and miscellaneous information, besides their professed contents; in this respect also being very like his later works.