genius, prompt to receive each novel
impression, was a companion for the youthful, and a communicator of
knowledge even for the most curious.

Even the steps of time are retraced, and we resume the possessions we
seemed to have lost; for in advanced life a return to our early studies
refreshes and renovates the spirits: we open the poets who made us
enthusiasts, and the philosophers who taught us to think, with a new
source of feeling acquired by our own experience. ADAM SMITH confessed his
satisfaction at this pleasure to Professor Dugald Stewart, while "he was
reperusing, with the enthusiasm of a student, the tragic poets of ancient
Greece, and Sophocles and Euripides lay open on his table."

Dans ses veines toujours un jeune sang bouillone,
Et Sophocle a cent ans peint encore Antigone.

The calm philosophic Hume found that death only could interrupt the keen
pleasure he was again receiving from Lucian, inspiring at the moment a
humorous self-dialogue with Charon. "Happily," said this philosopher, "on
retiring from the world I found my taste for reading return, even with
greater avidity." We find GIBBON, after the close of his History,
returning with an appetite as keen to "a full repast on Homer and
Aristophanes, and involving himself in the philosophic maze of the
writings of Plato." Lord WOODHOUSELEE found the recomposition of his
"Lectures on History" so fascinating in the last period of his life, that
Mr. Alison informs us, "it rewarded him with that _peculiar delight_,
which has been often observed in the later years of literary men; the
delight of returning again to the studies of their youth, and of feeling
under the snows of age the cheerful memories of their spring."[A]

[Footnote A: There is an interesting chapter on Favourite Authors in
"Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii., to which the reader may be referred
for other examples.--ED.]

Not without a sense of exultation has the literary character felt this
peculiar happiness, in the unbroken chain of his habits and his feelings.
HOBBES exulted that he had outlived his enemies, and was still the same
Hobbes; and to demonstrate the reality of this existence, published, in
the eighty-seventh year of his age, his version of the _Odyssey_, and the
following year his _Iliad_. Of the happy results of literary habits in
advanced life, the Count DE TRESSAN, the elegant abridger of the old
French romances, in his "Literary Advice to his Children" has drawn