It is formally testified that, from a copy of Vegetius _de Re Militari_, in the school library of St.Paul's, MARLBOROUGH imbibed his passion for a military life.

If he could not understand the text, the prints were, in such a mind, sufficient to awaken the passion for military glory.

ROUSSEAU in early youth, full of his Plutarch, while he was also devouring the trash of romances, could only conceive human nature in the colossal forms, or be affected by the infirm sensibility of an imagination mastering all his faculties; thinking like a Roman, and feeling like a Sybarite.

The same circumstance happened to CATHERINE MACAULEY, who herself has told us how she owed the bent of her character to the early reading of the Roman historians; but combining Roman admiration with English faction, she violated truth in English characters, and exaggerated romance in her Roman.

But the permanent effect of a solitary bias in the youth of genius, impelling the whole current of his after-life, is strikingly displayed in the remarkable character of Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, the author of the famous "Confessional," and the curious "Memoirs of Hollis," written with such a republican fierceness.
I had long considered the character of our archdeacon as a _lusus politicus et theologicus_.