you must adopt some system for your studies, and some locality for your
reading. Have a room to yourself; set apart certain hours in the day
for your books, and allow no consideration on earth to influence you to
violate their sacredness; and above all, my dear boy, keep your papers
in order. I find a dissertation on 'The Commerce of Carthage' stuck in
my large paper copy of 'Dibdin's Decameron,' and an 'Essay on the
Metaphysics of Music' (pray, my dear fellow, beware of magazine
scribbling) cracking the back of Montfaucon's 'Monarchie.'"

Vivian apologised, promised, protested, and finally sat down "TO READ."
He had laid the foundations of accurate classical knowledge under the
tuition of the learned Dallas; and twelve hours a day and
self-banishment from society overcame, in twelve months, the ill effects
of his imperfect education. The result of this extraordinary exertion
may be conceived. At the end of twelve months, Vivian, like many other
young enthusiasts, had discovered that all the wit and wisdom of the
world were concentrated in some fifty antique volumes, and he treated
the unlucky moderns with the most sublime spirit of hauteur imaginable.
A chorus in the Medea, that painted the radiant sky of Attica, disgusted
him with the foggy atmosphere of Great Britain; and while Mrs. Grey was
meditating a visit to Brighton, her son was dreaming of the gulf of
Salamis. The spectre in the Persae was his only model for a ghost, and
the furies in the Orestes were his perfection of tragical machinery.

Most ingenious and educated youths have fallen into the same error, but
few have ever carried such feelings to the excess that Vivian Grey did;
for while his mind was daily becoming more enervated under the beautiful
but baneful influence of Classic Reverie, the youth lighted upon PLATO.

Wonderful is it that while the whole soul of Vivian Grey seemed