graces of the language; and the peculiar style of Gibbon is traced by himself “to the constant habit of speaking one language, and writing another.”  The first studies of REMBRANDT affected his after-labours.  The peculiarity of shadow which marks all his pictures, originated in the circumstance of his father’s mill receiving light from an aperture at the top, which habituated the artist afterwards to view all objects as if seen in that magical light.  The intellectual POUSSIN, as Nicholas has been called, could never, from an early devotion to the fine statues of antiquity, extricate his genius on the canvas from the hard forms of marble:  he sculptured with his pencil; and that cold austerity of tone, still more remarkable in his last pictures, as it became mannered, chills the spectator on a first glance.  When POPE was a child, he found in his mother’s closet a small library of mystical devotion; but it was not suspected, till the fact was discovered, that the effusions of love and religion poured forth in his “Eloisa” were caught from the seraphic raptures of those erotic mystics, who to the last retained a place in his library among the classical bards of antiquity.  The accidental perusal of Quintus Curtius first made BOYLE, to use his own words, “in love with other than pedantic books, and conjured up in him an unsatisfied appetite of knowledge; so that he thought he owed more to Quintus Curtius than did Alexander.”  From the perusal of Rycaut’s folio of Turkish history in childhood, the noble and impassioned bard of our times retained those indelible impressions which gave life and motion to the “Giaour,” “the Corsair,” and “Alp.”  A voyage to the country produced the scenery.  Rycaut only communicated the impulse to a mind susceptible of the poetical character; and without this Turkish history we should still have had the poet.[A]

[Footnote A:  The following manuscript note by Lord Byron on this passage, cannot fail to interest the lovers of poetry, as well as the inquirers into the history of the human mind.  His lordship’s recollections of his first readings will not alter the tendency of my conjecture; it only proves that he had read much more of Eastern history and manners than Rycaut’s folio, which probably led to this class of books: 

“Knolles—­Cantemir—­De Tott—­Lady M.W.  Montagu—­Hawkins’s translation from Mignot’s History of the Turks—­the Arabian Nights—­all travels or histories or books upon the East I could meet with, I had read, as well as Rycaut, before I was ten years old.  I think the Arabian Nights first.  After these I preferred the history of naval actions, Don Quixote, and Smollett’s novels, particularly Roderick Random, and I was passionate for the Roman History.

“When a boy I could never bear to read any poetry whatever without disgust and reluctance.”—­MS. note by Lord Byron. Latterly Lord Byron acknowledged in a conversation held in Greece with Count Gamba, not long before he died, “The Turkish History was one of the first books that gave me pleasure when a child; and I believe it had much influence on my subsequent wishes to visit the Levant; and gave perhaps the Oriental colouring which is observed in my poetry.”