But, while this defect was such a source of mortification to his spirit, it was also, and in an equal degree, perhaps, a stimulus:—­and more especially in whatever depended upon personal prowess or attractiveness, he seemed to feel himself piqued by this stigma, which nature, as he thought, had set upon him, to distinguish himself above those whom she had endowed with her more “fair proportion.”  In pursuits of gallantry he was, I have no doubt, a good deal actuated by this incentive; and the hope of astonishing the world, at some future period, as a chieftain and hero, mingled little less with his young dreams than the prospect of a poet’s glory.  “I will, some day or other,” he used to say, when a boy, “raise a troop,—­the men of which shall be dressed in black, and ride on black horses.  They shall be called ‘Byron’s Blacks,’ and you will hear of their performing prodigies of valour.”

I have already adverted to the exceeding eagerness with which, while at Harrow, he devoured all sorts of learning,—­excepting only that which, by the regimen of the school, was prescribed for him.  The same rapid and multifarious course of study he pursued during the holidays; and, in order to deduct as little as possible from his hours of exercise, he had given himself the habit, while at home, of reading all dinner-time.[62] In a mind so versatile as his, every novelty, whether serious or light, whether lofty or ludicrous, found a welcome and an echo; and I can easily conceive the glee—­as a friend of his once described it to me—­with which he brought to her, one evening, a copy of Mother Goose’s Tales, which he had bought from a hawker that morning, and read, for the first time, while he dined.

I shall now give, from a memorandum-book begun by him this year, the account, as I find it hastily and promiscuously scribbled out, of all the books in various departments of knowledge, which he had already perused at a period of life when few of his school-fellows had yet travelled beyond their longs and shorts.  The list is, unquestionably, a remarkable one;—­and when we recollect that the reader of all these volumes was, at the same time, the possessor of a most retentive memory, it may be doubted whether, among what are called the regularly educated, the contenders for scholastic honours and prizes, there could be found a single one who, at the same age, has possessed any thing like the same stock of useful knowledge.

    “LIST OF HISTORICAL WRITERS WHOSE WORKS I HAVE PERUSED IN
     DIFFERENT LANGUAGES.”

     "History of England.—­Hume, Rapin, Henry, Smollet, Tindal,
     Belsham, Bisset, Adolphus, Holinshed, Froissart’s Chronicles
     (belonging properly to France).

     "Scotland.—­Buchanan, Hector Boethius, both in the Latin.

     "Ireland.—­Gordon.

"Rome.—­Hooke, Decline and Fall by Gibbon, Ancient History by Rollin (including an account of the Carthaginians, &c.), besides Livy, Tacitus, Eutropius, Cornelius Nepos, Julius Caesar, Arrian.  Sallust.

     “Greece.—­Mitford’s Greece, Leland’s Philip, Plutarch,
     Potter’s Antiquities, Xenophon, Thucydides, Herodotus.