121.) Ed.] [Footnote B: Note the meaning, as well as the 'curiosa felicitas', of this phrase .-- Ed.] [Footnote C: His Cambridge studies were very miscellaneous, partly owing to his strong natural disinclination to work by rule, partly to unmethodic training at Hawkshead, and to the fact that he had already mastered so much of Euclid and Algebra as to have a twelvemonth's start of the freshmen of his year.
"Accordingly," he tells us, "I got into rather an idle way, reading nothing but Classic authors, according to my fancy, and Italian poetry.

As I took to these studies with much interest my Italian master was proud of the progress I made.

Under his correction I translated the Vision of Mirza, and two or three other papers of the 'Spectator' into Italian." Speaking of her brother Christopher, then at Cambridge, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote thus in 1793: "He is not so ardent in any of his pursuits as William is, but he is yet particularly attached to the same pursuits which have so irresistible an influence over William, _and deprive him of the power of chaining his attention to others discordant to his feelings._" Ed.] [Footnote D: April 1804 .-- Ed.] [Footnote E: There is no ash tree now in the grove of St.John's College, Cambridge, and no tradition as to where it stood.

Covered as it was--trunk and branch--with "clustering ivy" in 1787, it survived till 1808 at any rate.

See Note IV.