of
the place, and was at no time an accurate scholar. In the _Bards and
Reviewers_, and elsewhere, he evinces considerable familiarity with the
leading authors of antiquity, but it is doubtful whether he was able to
read any of the more difficult of them in the original. His translations
are generally commonplace, and from the marks on his books he must have
often failed to trust his memory for the meanings of the most ordinary
Greek words. To the well-known passage in _Childe Harold_ on Soracte and
the "Latian echoes" he appends a prose comment, which preserves its
interest as hearing on recent educational controversies:--"I wish to
express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the
beauty; that we learn by rote, before we get by heart; that the freshness
is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and
destroyed, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of
composition, which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin
and Greek, to relish or to reason upon.... In some parts of the continent
young persons are taught from common authors, and do not read the best
classics till their maturity."

Comparatively slight stress was then laid on modern languages. Byron
learnt to read French with fluency, as he certainly made himself familiar
with the great works of the eighteenth century; but he spoke it with so
little ease or accuracy that the fact was always a stumbling-block to his
meeting Frenchmen abroad. Of German he had a mere smattering. Italian was
the only language, besides his own, of which he was ever a master. But the
extent and variety of his general reading was remarkable. His list of
books, drawn up in 1807, includes more history and biography than most men
of education read during a long life; a fair load of philosophy; the poets
en masse; among orators, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Parliamentary debates
from the Revolution to the year 1742; pretty copious divinity, including
Blair, Tillotson, Hooker, with the characteristic addition--"all very
tiresome. I abhor books of religion, though I reverence and love my God
without the blasphemous notions of sectaries." Lastly, under the head of
"Miscellanies" we have _Spectator, Rambler, World, &c., &c_; among novels,
the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie, Sterne,
Rabelais, and Rousseau. He recommends Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ as
the best storehouse for second-hand quotation