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gained a clear insight into language, its structure and its progress. The questions he was now in the habit of putting, were often such, as would have occurred to few boys, who had doubled his years. His evident pleasure, when they were satisfactorily resolved, proved his curiosity not to have been more alive to the difficulty, than his understanding to the solution. He was capable of dieting his mind, with more than ordinary relish and perseverance, on what is generally considered as the dry and husky food of elementary knowledge. It was with the utmost avidity, that he looked for my assistance, in comparing the idiom and construction of the examples in the Latin syntax used at Eton, with the idiom and construction of his own and the French languages. Indeed, his acuteness in tracing the etymology, and reducing to their elements the component parts of words, pursuing them through English and French, and enquiring after their forms in Greek and Italian, ground as yet untouched by him,
