Lord Melbourne's Papers #233038

One of Lord Melbourne's characteristics, which I must not pass over, was his insatiable love of reading, and the vast store of knowledge which he had collected. His life was particularly fortunate in enabling him to do this. His sound classical education and close ao quaintance with the ancients he possessed in common with most of the eminent men of his generation. But men who rise to eminence have in general, after they attain manhood, very little time even to keep up what they have already acquired, much less to read deeply in new directions. Lord Melbourne did not enter upon any real or absorbing business till he was nearly fifty years old, and though he undoubtedly suffered in some respects from want of those habits of method and punc tuality which early apprenticeship to business can alone give, he was enabled by the same cause to collect to gether an almost unprecedented amount of learning on almost every subject. The same circumstances, the fact of his having been for many years what is com monly called a man of leisure, gave him the practice and the power of continually drawing upon his vast stores for the entertainment of others in the simplest and most natural manner. He was a man saturated with information, which was continually bubbling over in an original and sometimes fantastic form.