ows (and he knows nearly all I ever heard of) without the aid of a
master in any, excepting German, in which he began with a master, but
soon dismissed him, because he hindered more than he helped. He read
Hebrew with a Jewish rabbi, but that was after he had learned the
language. He considers the knowledge of languages valuable only as the
stepping-stone to other learning, and spoke with contempt of a person in
Egypt who was mentioned to him as speaking eight languages familiarly.

"Has he done anything?"

"No."

"Then he is only fit to be a courier."

Buckle is not a university-man, although both his father and grandfather
were educated at Cambridge.

He has long since abandoned the practice of writing at night, and now
does not put pen to paper after three o'clock in the afternoon. When at
home, in London, he walks every day, for about an hour and a half, at
noon; frequently dines out and reads perhaps an hour after coming home.
He goes exclusively to dinner-parties, because they take less time than
others. When he is engaged in composition, he walks about the room,
sometimes excitedly, his mind engrossed with his subject, until he has
composed an entire paragraph, when he sits down and writes it, never
retouching, nor composing sentence by sentence, which he thinks has a
tendency to give an abrupt and jerky effect to what is written. Traces
of this, he thinks, may be found in Macaulay's style.

Mr. Thayer showed him the little stock of books he happened to have with
him at Cairo. Mr. Buckle looked them over with interest, expressing his
opinions upon them. One of them, Mr. Bayle St. John's little book on the
Turkish question, he borrowed, although he said that he denied himself
all reading on this journey, undertaken for mental rest, and had brought
no books with him. We got upon the inevitable subject of international
copyright, which he discussed in a spirit of remarkable candor. His
own experience was this: that the Messrs. Appleton reprinted his first
volume without compensation, asking him to furnish materials for a
prefatory memoir, of which request he took no notice; afterwards, when
the second volume was published, they sent him something, I believe
fifty pounds. In due course of time, receiving a request from Theodore
Parker to that effect, he wrote a letter to aid him in the preparation
of a memoir for the Messrs. Appleton's Cyclopaedia.[B]

[Footnote B: In this memoir it is stated that Mr. Buckle w