LITTLE mentaries and making wise comments over his bowl 

 JOURNEYS of bread and milk about the Tenth Legion ; and he also 

 had his opinions concerning the relationship of Caesar 

 with Cleopatra. At this time he read Josephus for rest, 

 and discovered for himself that the famous passage 

 about Jesus of Nazareth was an interpolation. 

 When he was eight he was familiar with Plato, had 

 read all of Shakespeare's plays and propounded a few 

 hypotheses concerning the authorship of the Sonnets. 

 QAt nine he spoke Greek with an Attic accent. When 

 ten he had read Prescott, Gibbon, and Macaulay, and 

 about this time as a memory test he wrote a history 

 of the world from the time of Moses down to the date 

 of his own birth, giving a list of the greatest men who 

 had ever lived, with a brief mention of what they had 

 done, with the date of their birth and death. 

 This book is still in existence and so far as I know has 

 never been equaled by the performance of any infant 

 prodigy save possibly John Stuart Mill. 

 When twelve years of age he had read Virgil, Sallust, 

 Tacitus, Ovid, Juvenal and Catullus. He had also 

 mastered trigonometry, surveying, navigation, geom- 

 etry and differential calculus. 



Before his grandmother had him discard knee-breeches 

 he kept his diary in Spanish, spoke German at the 

 table, read German philosophy in the original. The 

 year he was sixteen he wrote poems after Dante in 

 Italian and translated Cervantes into English. At 

 seventeen he read the Hebrew scriptures like a Rabbi, 

 and was familiar with Sanskrit. 

 138 



