... My first prize that I took home was Gibbon's Decline and fall, in four volumes, because it was associated with Brynford lessons. I devoured it now for its own sake. Little by little, I acquired Spenser 's Faery Queen, Tasso's Jerusalem delivered, Pope's Iliad, Dryden's Odyssey, Paradise lost, Plutarch's Lives, Simplicius on Epictetus, a big History of the United States, the last of which I sa...