polyhistor
n. a person of great and varied learning
edacious
adj. greedy, eager
perlegate
v. to read through
defatigate
v. to tire out, exhaust, fatigue
In his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, Edward John Trelawny describes Shelley’s thirst for knowledge as “unquenchable”:
I called on him one morning at ten, he was in his study with a German folio open, resting on the broad marble mantel-piece, over an old-fashioned fire-place, and with a dictionary in his hand. He always read standing if possible. He had promised over night to go with me, but now begged me to let him off. I then rode to Leghorn, eleven or twelve miles distant, and passed the day there; on returning at six in the evening to dine with Mrs. Shelley and the Williams’s, as I had engaged to do, I went into the Poet’s room and found him exactly in the position in which I had left him in the morning, but looking pale and exhausted.
Trelawny pointed to a plate of bread and meat and Shelley admitted that this must have been his dinner; “I thought I had eaten it.” Trelawny pulled him into the dining room, “but he brought a book with him and read more than he ate.”
