before it was come to its due ripeness, which will thenceforth
shrink and wither, and lose that little juice and relish which it
began to have.

Even so it fared with me. For being taken home when I was but
young, and before I was well settled in my studies (though I had
made a good progress in the Latin tongue, and was entered in the
Greek) being left too much to myself, to ply or play with my books,
or without them, as I pleased, I soon shook hands with my books by
shaking my books out of my hands, and laying them by degrees quite
aside, and addicted myself to such youthful sports and pleasures as
the place afforded and my condition could reach unto.

By this means, in a little time I began to lose that little learning
I had acquired at school, and by a continued disuse of my books
became at length so utterly a stranger to learning, that I could not
have read, far less have understood, a sentence in Latin: which I
was so sensible of that I warily avoided reading to others, even in
an English book, lest, if I should meet with a Latin word, I should
shame myself by mispronouncing it.

Thus I went on, taking my swing in such vain courses as were
accounted harmless recreations, entertaining my companions and
familiar acquaintance with pleasant discourses in our conversations,
by the mere force of mother-wit and natural parts, without the help
of school cultivation; and was accounted good company too.

But I always sorted myself with persons of ingenuity, temperance,
and sobriety; for I loathed scurrilities in conversation, and had a
natural aversion to immoderate drinking. So that in the time of my