compositions, nor indeed in any other exercitations of his great
talents, which all inclined the same way, but once, when he had
laid violent hands on a book called Gradus ad Parnassum, i. e. A
step towards Parnassus, on which account his master, who was a man
of most wonderful wit and sagacity, is said to have told him he
wished it might not prove in the event Gradus ad Patibulum, i. e.
A step towards the gallows.

But, though he would not give himself the pains requisite to
acquire a competent sufficiency in the learned languages, yet did
he readily listen with attention to others, especially when they
translated the classical authors to him; nor was he in the least
backward, at all such times, to express his approbation. He was
wonderfully pleased with that passage in the eleventh Iliad where
Achilles is said to have bound two sons of Priam upon a mountain,
and afterwards to have released them for a sum of money. This was,
he said, alone sufficient to refute those who affected a contempt
for the wisdom of the ancients, and an undeniable testimony of the
great antiquity of priggism.[Footnote: This word, in the cant
language, signifies thievery.] He was ravished with the account
which Nestor gives in the same book of the rich booty which he
bore off (i.e. stole) from the Eleans. He was desirous of having
this often repeated to him, and at the end of every repetition he
constantly fetched a deep sigh, and said IT WAS A GLORIOUS BOOTY.

When the story of Cacus was read to him out of the eighth Aeneid
he generously pitied the unhappy fate of that great man, to whom
he thought Hercules much too severe: one of his schoolfellows
commending the dexterity of drawing the oxen backward by their
tails into his den, he smiled, and with some disdain said, HE