$22 - MEMOIR or 
He began with the great writers of antiquity—the Poets, 
the Orators, and the Historians of Greece and Rome, to whose 
works he now returned with that increase of knowledge, and 
that improvement of taste, which enabled him more fully 
to seize and to appretiate their various excellence. He next 
resumed, (though with more enlightened views), the study of 
Italian literature, and perused with new admiration the writers 
of that brilliant period which succeeded the revival of letters 
in Europe, and who, though formed, in the great principles of 
composition, upon the models of classic taste, have yet added 
to them all the splendid courtesy of feudal manners, and all 
the romantic interest of chivalrous adventure. After the ex- 
tinction, or (as I trust) only the slumber of Italian genius, he 
followed the progress of taste into France, and pursued the 
singular history of composition in that country, from the pe- 
riod that the genius of CornerILix first gave to its imperfect 
language the dignity of poetry, to the time that the eloquence 
of Feneton, of Burron, and of Rousseau, rose above the level 
of its poetic diction, and gave to prose composition all the 
powers and all the pathos of poetry. 
The study of foreign literature led Mr Tyrxer naturally to 
that of his own country, and, in comparing the great writers of 
England with those of the different nations of the Continent, 
he was enabled to form a more accurate estimate, both of the 
_ extent of English genius, and the powers of the English lan- 
guage. While engaged in this pursuit, his curiosity was led 
into a field at that time little cultivated in this country, I mean 
to the study of the ancient writers of England, those original mas- 
ters of composition, in whose writings the genius of the people ‘ 
and of the language is most strongly displayed, and who con- 
ducted him (in the language of Spenser) to “ the pure well of 
“ English undefiled.” The pursuit not only rewarded him at 
the 
