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To this early and extensive study of English writers may be attributed
that mastery over the resources of his own language with which Lord
Byron came furnished into the field of literature, and which enabled
him, as fast as his youthful fancies sprung up, to clothe them with a
diction worthy of their strength and beauty. In general, the
difficulty of young writers, at their commencement, lies far less in
any lack of thoughts or images, than in that want of a fitting organ
to give those conceptions vent, to which their unacquaintance with the
great instrument of the man of genius, his native language, dooms
them. It will be found, indeed, that the three most remarkable
examples of early authorship, which, in their respective lines, the
history of literature affords--Pope, Congreve, and Chatterton--were
all of them persons self-educated,[63] according to their own
intellectual wants and tastes, and left, undistracted by the worse
than useless pedantries of the schools, to seek, in the pure "well of
English undefiled," those treasures of which they accordingly so very
early and intimately possessed themselves.[64] To these three
instances may now be added, virtually, that of Lord Byron, who, though
a disciple of the schools, was, intellectually speaking, _in_
them, not _of_ them, and who, while his comrades were prying
curiously into the graves of dead languages, betook himself to the
fresh, living sources of his own,[65] and from thence drew those
rich, varied stores of diction, which have placed his works, from the
age of two-and-twenty upwards, among the most precious depositories of
the strength and sweetness of the English language that our whole
literature supplies.
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