From my eighth to my twelfth year, the Latin books which I remember
reading were, the _Bucolics_ of Virgil, and the first six books of the
Aeneid; all Horace, except the Epodes; the Fables of Phaedrus; the
first five books of Livy (to which from my love of the subject I
voluntarily added, in my hours of leisure, the remainder of the first
decade); all Sallust; a considerable part of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_;
some plays of Terence; two or three books of Lucretius; several of the
Orations of Cicero, and of his writings on oratory; also his letters
to Atticus, my father taking the trouble to translate to me from the
French the historical explanations in Mingault's notes. In Greek I
read the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ through; one or two plays of Sophocles,
Euripides, and Aristophanes, though by these I profited little; all
Thucydides; the _Hellenics_ of Xenophon; a great part of Demosthenes,
Aeschines, and Lysias; Theocritus; Anacreon; part of the _Anthology_;
a little of Dionysius; several books of Polybius; and lastly
Aristotle's _Rhetoric_, which, as the first expressly scientific
treatise on any moral or psychological subject which I had read, and
containing many of the best observations of the ancients on human
nature and life, my father made me study with peculiar care, and throw
the matter of it into synoptic tables. During the same years I learnt
elementary geometry and algebra thoroughly, the differential calculus,
and other portions of the higher mathematics far from thoroughly: for
my father, not having kept up this part of his early acquired
knowledge, could not spare time to qualify himself for removing my
difficulties, and left me to deal with them, with little other aid
than that of books: while I was continually incurring his displeasure
by my inability to solve difficult problems for which he did not see
that I had not the necessary previous knowledge.

As to my private reading, I can only speak of what I remember. History