'And laid the storm,' &c.: the advice given to Augustus by Athenodorus the Stoic philosopher.
See Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, Act v, sc. i. Holofernes 'teaches boys the horn-book'.
P. 181. Richardson.—In his preface to Pamela Richardson claims to give 'practical examples worthy to be followed in the most critical and affecting cases by the modest virgin, the chaste bride, and the obliging wife'. The heroine becomes Mrs. B——, and Billy is the first-born. Locke's treatise was published in 1693, or forty-seven years before Richardson's novel, and the philosopher observes 'That most Children's Constitutions are either spoiled, or at least harmed, by Cockering and Tenderness'. 'Mr. B.' recommended better than he knew.
P. 181. Johnson ('At large in the library').—Ruskin gives the same advice. See p. [208].
P. 183. Gibbon.—The Autobiography, in Sir Archibald Alison's opinion, is 'the most perfect account of an eminent man's life, from his own hand, which exists in any language'.
P. 186. Landor.—See the poem to Wordsworth on p. [21].
P. 187. Hunt.—The friend referred to was Shelley.
P. 188. Dickens.—Of this passage, Forster says in the Life of Dickens, 'It is one of the many passages in Copperfield which are literally true.... Every word of this personal recollection had been written down as fact, some years before it found its way into David Copperfield; the only change in the fiction being his omission of the name of a cheap series of novelists then in course of publication, by means of which his father had become happily the owner of so large a lump of literary treasure in his small collection of books.'
Apropos of Defoe, Macaulay, who could not 'understand the mania of some people about Defoe', admitted that 'he certainly wrote an excellent book—the first part of Robinson Crusoe ... my delight before I was five years old'.
P. 189. Hazlitt.—It is reported (Dibdin relates in Bibliomania) that a certain man, of the name of Similis, who fought under the Emperor Hadrian, became so wearied and disgusted with the number of troublesome events which he met with in that mode of life, that he retired and devoted himself wholly to leisure and reading, and to meditations upon divine and human affairs, after the manner of Pythagoras. In this retirement, Similis was wont frequently to exclaim that 'now he began to live': at his death he desired the following inscription to be placed upon his tomb.