"He seemed to read through the skin," said one who had often watched the operation.

And this speed was not in his case obtained at the expense of accuracy.

Anything which had once appeared in type, from the highest effort of genius down to the most detestable trash that ever consumed ink and paper manufactured for better things, had in his eyes an authority which led him to look upon misquotation as a species of minor sacrilege.
With these endowments, sharpened by an insatiable curiosity, from his fourteenth year onward he was permitted to roam almost at will over the whole expanse of literature.

He composed little beyond his school exercises, which themselves bear signs of having been written in a perfunctory manner.

At this period he had evidently no heart in anything but his reading.