I omitted the following note in my last edition, but I shall now preserve it, as it may enter into the history of his lordship’s character: 

“When I was in Turkey I was oftener tempted to turn Mussulman than poet, and have often regretted since that I did not. 1818.”]

The influence of first studies in the formation of the character of genius is a moral phenomenon which has not sufficiently attracted our notice.  FRANKLIN acquaints us that, when young and wanting books, he accidentally found De Foe’s “Essay on Projects,” from which work impressions were derived which afterwards influenced some of the principal events of his life.  The lectures of REYNOLDS probably originated in the essays of Richardson.  It is acknowledged that these first made him a painter, and not long afterwards an author; and it is said that many of the principles in his lectures may be traced in those first studies.  Many were the indelible and glowing impressions caught by the ardent Reynolds from those bewildering pages of enthusiasm!  Sir WALTER RAWLEIGH, according to a family tradition, when a young man, was perpetually reading and conversing on the discoveries of Columbus, and the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro.  His character, as well as the great events of his life, seem to have been inspired by his favourite histories; to pass beyond the discoveries of the Spaniards became a passion, and the vision of his life.  It is formally testified that, from a copy of Vegetius de Re Militari, in the school library of St. Paul’s, MARLBOROUGH imbibed his passion for a military life.  If he could not understand the text, the prints were, in such a mind, sufficient to awaken the passion for military glory.  ROUSSEAU in early youth, full of his Plutarch, while he was also devouring the trash of romances, could only conceive human nature in the colossal forms, or be affected by the infirm sensibility of an imagination mastering all his faculties; thinking like a Roman, and feeling like a Sybarite.  The same circumstance happened to CATHERINE MACAULEY, who herself has told us how she owed the bent of her character to the early reading of the Roman historians; but combining Roman admiration with English faction, she violated truth in English characters, and exaggerated romance in her Roman.  But the permanent effect of a solitary bias in the youth of genius, impelling the whole current of his after-life, is strikingly displayed in the remarkable character of Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, the author of the famous “Confessional,” and the curious “Memoirs of Hollis,” written with such a republican fierceness.