a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips
listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen
to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
Something of that sort happened to Lydgate. He was a quick fellow,
and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five
minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on:
if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's
Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it.
Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running
and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true
of him at ten years of age; he had then read through "Chrysal,
or the Adventures of a Guinea," which was neither milk for babes,
nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already
occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.
His school studies had not much modified that opinion, for though he
"did" his classics and mathematics, he was not pre-eminent in them.
It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked,
but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable.
He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark
had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed
to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the
conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than
was necessary for mature life. Probably this was not an exceptional
result of expensive teaching at that period of short-waisted coats,
and other fashions which have not yet recurred. But, one vacation,
a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for
a book which might have some freshness for him: in vain! unless,
indeed, he took down a dusty row of volumes with gray-paper backs
and dingy labels--the volumes of an old Cyclopaedia which he had
never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to disturb them.