“LAW.

     “Blackstone, Montesquieu.

     “PHILOSOPHY.

     “Paley, Locke, Bacon, Hume, Berkeley, Drummond, Beattie, and
     Bolingbroke.  Hobbes I detest.

     “GEOGRAPHY.

     “Strabo, Cellarius, Adams, Pinkerton, and Guthrie.

     “POETRY.

“All the British Classics as before detailed, with most of the living poets, Scott, Southey, &c.—­Some French, in the original, of which the Cid is my favourite.—­Little Italian.—­Greek and Latin without number;—­these last I shall give up in future.—­I have translated a good deal from both languages, verse as well as prose.

     “ELOQUENCE.

     “Demosthenes, Cicero, Quintilian, Sheridan, Austin’s
     Chironomia, and Parliamentary Debates from the Revolution to
     the year 1742.

     “DIVINITY.

“Blair, Porteus, Tillotson, Hooker,—­all very tiresome.  I abhor books of religion, though I reverence and love my God, without the blasphemous notions of sectaries, or belief in their absurd and damnable heresies, mysteries, and Thirty-nine Articles.

     “MISCELLANIES.

     “Spectator, Rambler, World, &c. &c.—­Novels by the thousand.

“All the books here enumerated I have taken down from memory.  I recollect reading them, and can quote passages from any mentioned.  I have, of course, omitted several in my catalogue; but the greater part of the above I perused before the age of fifteen.  Since I left Harrow, I have become idle and conceited, from scribbling rhyme and making love to women.  B.—­Nov. 30. 1807.

“I have also read (to my regret at present) above four thousand novels, including the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollet, Richardson, Mackenzie, Sterne, Rabelais, and Rousseau, &c. &c.  The book, in my opinion, most useful to a man who wishes to acquire the reputation of being well read, with the least trouble, is “Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,” the most amusing and instructive medley of quotations and classical anecdotes I ever perused.  But a superficial reader must take care, or his intricacies will bewilder him.  If, however, he has patience to go through his volumes, he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted,—­at least, in the English language.”

To this early and extensive study of English writers may be attributed that mastery over the resources of his own language with which Lord Byron came furnished into the field of literature, and which enabled him, as fast as his youthful fancies sprung up, to clothe them with a diction worthy of their strength and beauty.  In general, the difficulty of young writers, at their commencement, lies far less in any lack of thoughts or images, than in that want of a fitting organ to give those conceptions vent, to which their unacquaintance