riters than Burke, they either lie out of my course of study, or
are beyond my sphere of comprehension. I am too old to be a convert to a
new mythology of genius. The niches are occupied, the tables are full. If
such is still my admiration of this man's misapplied powers, what must it
have been at a time when I myself was in vain trying, year after year, to
write a single Essay, nay, a single page or sentence; when I regarded the
wonders of his pen with the longing eyes of one who was dumb and a
changeling; and when, to be able to convey the slightest conception of my
meaning to others in words, was the height of an almost hopeless ambition!
But I never measured others' excellences by my own defects: though a sense
of my own incapacity, and of the steep, impassable ascent from me to them,
made me regard them with greater awe and fondness. I have thus run through
most of my early studies and favourite authors, some of whom I have since
criticised more at large. Whether those observations will survive me, I
neither know nor do I much care: but to the works themselves, "worthy of
all acceptation," and to the feelings they have always excited in me since
I could distinguish a meaning in language, nothing shall ever prevent me
from looking back with gratitude and triumph. To have lived in the
cultivation of an intimacy with such works, and to have familiarly
relished such names, is not to have lived quite in vain.

There are other authors whom I have never read, and yet whom I have
frequently had a great desire to read, from some circumstance relating to
them. Among these is Lord Clarendon's History of the Grand Rebellion,
after which I have a hankering, from hearing it spoken of by good
judges--from my interest in the events, and knowledge of the characters
from other sources, and from having seen fine portraits of most of them. I
like to read a well-penned character, and Clarendon is said to have been a
master in this way. I should like to read Froissart's Chronicles,
Hollinshed and Stowe, and Fuller's Worthies. I intend, whenever I can, to
read Beaumont and Fletcher all through. There are fifty-two of their
plays, and I have only read a dozen or fourteen of them. A Wife for a
Month, and Thierry and Theodoret, are, I am told, delicious, and I can
believe it. I should like to read the speeches in Thucydides, and
Guicciardini's History of Florence, and Don Quixote in the original. I
have often thought of reading the Loves of P