an inclination to study Arabic. His prudence discouraged this
childish fancy; but he neglected the fair occasion of directing the
ardour of a curious mind. During my absence in the summer vacation,
Dr. Waldegrave accepted a college living at Washington in Sussex,
and on my return I no longer found him at Oxford. From that time I
have lost sight of my first tutor; but at the end of thirty years
(1781) he was still alive; and the practice of exercise and
temperance had entitled him to a healthy old age.

The long recess between the Trinity and Michaelmas terms empties the
colleges of Oxford, as well as the courts of Westminster. I spent,
at my father's house at Beriton in Hampshire, the two months of
August and September. It is whimsical enough, that as soon as I
left Magdalen College, my taste for books began to revive; but it
was the same blind and boyish taste for the pursuit of exotic
history. Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits
of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to
write a book. The title of this first Essay, The Age of Sesostris,
was perhaps suggested by Voltaire's Age of Lewis XIV. which was new
and popular; but my sole object was to investigate the probable date
of the life and reign of the conqueror of Asia. I was then
enamoured of Sir John Marsham's Canon Chronicus; an elaborate work,
of whose merits and defects I was not yet qualified to judge.
According to his specious, though narrow plan, I settled my hero
about the time of Solomon, in the tenth century before the Christian
era. It was therefore incumbent on me, unless I would adopt Sir
Isaac Newton's shorter chronology, to remove a formidable objection;
and my solution, for a youth of fifteen, is not devoid of ingenuity.
In his version of the Sacred Books, Manetho, high priest has
identified Sethosis, or Sesostris, with the elder brother of Danaus,