There was a large old Free Library at Newcastle-on-Tyne, left to the
city by a celebrated clergyman, which contained all the Fathers, all the
Greek and Roman Classics, all the more celebrated of the old Infidels,
all the old leading skeptical and lawless writers of Italy, and France,
and Holland, all the great old Church of England writers, and all the
leading writers of the Nonconformists, Dissenters, and Heretics of all
kinds. To this library I used to go, day after day, and stay from
morning to night, reading some of the great authors through, and
examining almost all of them sufficiently to enable me to see what there
was _in_ each, that I had not met with in the rest. Here I read Hobbes
and Machiavel, Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury, Tindal and Chubb. Here I
first saw the works of Cudworth and Chillingworth, and here too I first
found the entire works of Bacon and Newton, of Locke and Boyle. Here
also I read the works of some of the older defenders of the faith.
Grotius on the truth of the Christian religion I had read much earlier.
I had used it as a school book, translating it both out of Latin into
English, and out of English back into Latin, imprinting it thereby
almost word for word upon my memory. I had also read the work of his
commentator on the causes of incredulity. Leland on the deistical
writers, and Paley's Evidences, and others, I read after. But in this
great old library I met with numbers of interesting and important works
that I have never met with since. And here, in the dimly lighted
antiquated rooms, I used to fill my mind with a world of facts, and
thoughts, and fancies, and then go away to meditate upon them while
travelling on my way, or sitting in my room, or lying on my bed. Day and
night, alone and in company, these were the things which filled my mind
and exercised my thoughts.

And having a rather retentive memory, and considerable powers of