family tradition, when a young man, was perpetually reading and conversing
on the discoveries of Columbus, and the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro.
His character, as well as the great events of his life, seem to have been
inspired by his favourite histories; to pass beyond the discoveries of the
Spaniards became a passion, and the vision of his life. It is formally
testified that, from a copy of Vegetius _de Re Militari_, in the school
library of St. Paul's, MARLBOROUGH imbibed his passion for a military
life. If he could not understand the text, the prints were, in such a
mind, sufficient to awaken the passion for military glory. ROUSSEAU in
early youth, full of his Plutarch, while he was also devouring the trash
of romances, could only conceive human nature in the colossal forms, or be
affected by the infirm sensibility of an imagination mastering all his
faculties; thinking like a Roman, and feeling like a Sybarite. The same
circumstance happened to CATHERINE MACAULEY, who herself has told us how
she owed the bent of her character to the early reading of the Roman
historians; but combining Roman admiration with English faction, she
violated truth in English characters, and exaggerated romance in her
Roman. But the permanent effect of a solitary bias in the youth of genius,
impelling the whole current of his after-life, is strikingly displayed in
the remarkable character of Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, the author of the
famous "Confessional," and the curious "Memoirs of Hollis," written with
such a republican fierceness.

I had long considered the character of our archdeacon as a _lusus
politicus et theologicus_. Having subscribed to the Articles, and enjoying
the archdeaconry, he was writing against subscription and the whole
hierarchy, with a spirit so irascible and caustic, that one would have
suspected that, like Prynne and Bastwick, the archdeacon had already lost
both his ears; while his antipathy to monarchy might have done honour to a
Roundhead of the Rota Club. The secret of these volcanic explosions was