of the South.

How was this shed his college? We have seen that he brought with
him from his native village an amount of information, habits of
observation, and a knowledge of books unusual in rustics of that
day, and even of the present time. At twelve he made his first
acquaintance with a language other than his own, when he mastered
the short grammar in Dyche's Latine Vocabulary, and committed nearly
the whole book to memory. When urging him to take the preaching at
Barton, Mr. Sutcliff of Olney gave him Ruddiman's Latin Grammar.
The one alleviation of his lot under the coarse but upright Nichols
was found in his master's small library. There he began to study
Greek. In a New Testament commentary he found Greek words, which he
carefully transcribed and kept until he should next visit home,
where a youth whom dissipation had reduced from college to weaving
explained both the words and their terminations to him. All that he
wanted was such beginnings. Hebrew he seems to have learned by the
aid of the neighbouring ministers; borrowing books from them, and
questioning them "pertinently," as he did Scott.3 At the end of
Hopkins's Three Sermons on the Effects of Sin on the Universe,
preached in 1759, he had made this entry on 9th August
1787--"Gulielm. Careius perlegit." He starved himself to purchase a
few books at the sale which attended Dr. Ryland's removal from
Northampton to Bristol. In an old woman's cottage he found a Dutch
quarto, and from that he so taught himself the language that in 1789
he translated for Ryland a discourse on the Gospel Offer sent to him
by the evangelical Dr. Erskine of Edinburgh. The manuscript is in
an extremely small character, unlike what might have been expected
from one who had wrought with his hands for eight years. French he
acquired, sufficiently for literary purposes, in three weeks from