been educated at home under a private tutor. He read everything
connected with general politics (meaning by _general_ not personal
politics) and with social philosophy. At Laxton, indeed; it was that
I first saw Godwin's "Political Justice;" not the second and emasculated
edition in _octavo_, but the original _quarto_ edition, with all its virus
as yet undiluted of raw anti-social Jacobinism.

At Laxton it was that I first saw the entire aggregate labors,
brigaded, as it were, and paraded as if for martial review, of that
most industrious benefactor to the early stages of our English
historical literature, Thomas Hearne. Three hundred guineas, I believe,
had been the price paid cheerfully at one time for a complete set of
Hearne. At Laxton, also, it was that first I saw the total array of
works edited by Dr. Birch. It was a complete _armilustrium_, a
_recognitio_, or mustering, as it were, not of pompous Praetorian
cohorts, or unique guardsmen, but of the yeomanry, the militia, or
what, under the old form of expression, you might regard as the
_trained bands_ of our literature--the fund from which ultimately,
or in the last resort, students look for the materials of our vast and
myriad-faced literature. A French author of eminence, fifty years back,
having occasion to speak of our English literature collectively, in
reference to the one point of its _variety_, being also a man of
honor, and disdaining that sort of patriotism which sacrifices the
truth to nationality, speaks of our pretensions in these words: _Les
Anglois qui ont une litterature infiniment plus variee que la
notre_. This fact is a feature in our national pretensions that
could ever have been regarded doubtfully merely through insufficient
knowledge. Dr. Johnson, indeed, made it the distinguishing merit of the
French, that they "have a book upon every subject." But Dr. Johnson was
not only capricious as regards temper and variable humors, but as