When her baby genius was just out of linsey-woolsey dresses and wore trousers buttoned to a calico waist, she began preparing him for college. The old lady had loved a college man in her youth, and she judged Harvard by the Harvard man she knew best. And the Harvard man she saw in her waking dreams, she created in her own image. Harvard requires perspective, and viewed over the years through a mist of melancholy it is very beautiful. At close range we often get a Jarrett Bumball flavor of cigarettes and a sight of the foam that made Milwaukee famous. To a great degree, Gran'ma Fiske created her Harvard out of the stuff that dreams are made of. When her little charge was six years old, she began preparing him for Harvard by teaching him to say, "amo, amas, amat."
At seven years of age he was reading Cæsar's "Commentaries" and making wise comments over his bowl of bread-and-milk about the Tenth Legion; and he also had his opinions concerning the relationship of Cæsar 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."
At 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 Vergil, Sallust, Tacitus, Ovid, Juvenal and Catullus. He had also mastered trigonometry, surveying, navigation, geometry and differential calculus.
Before his grandmother had him discard knee-breeches, he kept his diary in Spanish, spoke German at the table, and 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.
Now, let no carpist imagine I have dealt in hyperbole, or hand-illumined the facts: I have merely stated some simple truths about the early career of John Fiske.
One might imagine that with all his wonderful achievements this youth would be top-heavy and a most insufferable prig. The fact was, he was a fine, rollicking, healthy young man much given to pranks, and withal generous and lovable.