My circumstances were perhaps well fitted to the task of self-culture - too straitened to admit of much expenditure on books, but sufficiently easy to afford me plenty of leisure to read and study them when they were lent to me. At one time I longed to read Virgil but could not just then obtain it; night after night I dreamed of it, and when after many another book had been read and dismissed, I did procure it, I was exquisitely delighted with it.