influence, and to the common run of prosperous Englishmen, in that
generation than either before or since; and being not only a man whom
nothing would have induced to write against his convictions, but one
who invariably threw into everything he wrote, as much of his
convictions as he thought the circumstances would in any way permit:
being, it must also be said, one who never did anything negligently;
never undertook any task, literary or other, on which he did not
conscientiously bestow all the labour necessary for performing it
adequately. But he, with these burdens on him, planned, commenced, and
completed, the _History of India_; and this in the course of about ten
years, a shorter time than has been occupied (even by writers who had
no other employment) in the production of almost any other historical
work of equal bulk, and of anything approaching to the same amount of
reading and research. And to this is to be added, that during the
whole period, a considerable part of almost every day was employed in
the instruction of his children: in the case of one of whom, myself,
he exerted an amount of labour, care, and perseverance rarely, if
ever, employed for a similar purpose, in endeavouring to give,
according to his own conception, the highest order of intellectual
education.

A man who, in his own practice, so vigorously acted up to the
principle of losing no time, was likely to adhere to the same rule
in the instruction of his pupil. I have no remembrance of the time
when I began to learn Greek; I have been told that it was when I was
three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject, is that of
committing to memory what my father termed vocables, being lists of
common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he
wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some years later, I
learnt no more than the inflections of the nouns and verbs, but, after