sily content with such occasional teachers as the
different places of my residence could supply. I was never forced,
and seldom was I persuaded, to admit these lessons: yet I read with a
clergyman at Bath some odes of Horace, and several episodes of Virgil,
which gave me an imperfect and transient enjoyment of the Latin
poets. It might now be apprehended that I should continue for life
an illiterate cripple; but, as I approached my sixteenth year, Nature
displayed in my favour her mysterious energies: my constitution was
fortified and fixed; and my disorders, instead of growing with my growth
and strengthening with my strength, most wonderfully vanished. I have
never possessed or abused the insolence of health: but since that time
few persons have been more exempt from real or imaginary ills; and, till
I am admonished by the gout, the reader will no more be troubled with
the history of my bodily complaints. My unexpected recovery again
encouraged the hope of my education; and I was placed at Esher, in
Surrey, in the house of the Reverend Mr. Philip Francis, in a pleasant
spot, which promised to unite the various benefits of air, exercise,
and study (Jan.,1752). The translator of Horace might have taught me to
relish the Latin poets, had not my friends discovered in a few weeks,
that he preferred the pleasures of London, to the instruction of his
pupils. My father's perplexity at this time, rather than his prudence,
was urged to embrace a singular and desperate measure. Without
preparation or delay he carried me to Oxford; and I was matriculated in
the university as a gentleman commoner of Magdalen college, before I had
accomplished the fifteenth year of my age (April 3, 1752).

The curiosity, which had been implanted in my infant mind, was still
alive and active; but my reason was not sufficiently informed to
understand the value, or to lament the loss, of three precious years
from my entrance at Westminster to my admission at Oxford. Instead
of repining at my long and frequent confinement to the chamber or the
couch, I secretly rejoiced in those infirmities, which delivered me from
the exercises of the school, and the society of my equals. As often as
I was tolerably exempt from danger and pain, reading, free desultory
reading, was the employment and comfort of my solitary hours. At
Westminster, my aunt sought only to amuse and indulge me; in my stations
at Bath and Winchester, at Beriton and Putney, a false compassion