Herodotus) till now,
elevate the possessor and compel the homage, whilst exciting the no small
envy of inferior intellects. What education he received was at a small
school kept by the Rev. John Bruckner (a Lutheran Divine), who died in
1804, and was buried at Guist, in Norfolk, where French, Latin, and the
common rudiments of an English education were taught; and where, too, the
late William Taylor,--perhaps one of the most extraordinary men Norwich
ever produced, the early and intimate friend of Southey, and who was the
first, according to Lockhart's Life of Scott, to give that great writer a
taste for poetry by his (Taylor's) spirited and inimitable translation of
Burger's well known ballad beginning,--

"At break of day from frightful dreams up started Eleanor,"

was his fellow pupil, and who has told me what a gentle, industrious, and
amiable boy he remembered my father (truly, in this instance, the child
was father of the man); there he acquired, no doubt, some knowledge, but
it was far more to his own self-instruction that he was indebted for the
large and varied knowledge he possessed, for, as his brother Samuel (his
only and younger brother,--he had a sister but she died young) informed
my mother that such was his early thirst for knowledge, that he not only
repudiated all play, and the sports of boyhood, taught himself Greek, and
greedily devoured the contents of every book that came within his reach,
but would, with the pocket-money given him, purchase candles, and when
the family had retired to rest, light one, and sit and read till the dawn
of day, when he would creep into bed, and sleep till the hour of call,
when he would rise to resume anew his mental exercise. So years past by,
and the young and sickly looking boy grew into the youth, when his
father, a man of strong intellect, with a great deal of sound common
sense, perceiving the bent of his son's mind,--and being a man who had
retired early in life from business with a small property, on which he
lived in a house at Heigham (a hamlet within the city),--at once placed
his son Charles with one of the most respectable attornies, in large
business in Norwich, as an articled clerk to the law, where he very soon,
by his persevering industry, his assiduity, and the great acuteness shown
in every matter entrusted to his care and management, so conciliated the
good opinion of his master, who discovered progressively, the evident
marks of superior abilit