d the
life which he led afterwards during his school-days at Harrow, was,--as
naturally the life of so idle and daring a schoolboy must be,--the very
reverse of poetical. For a soldier or an adventurer, the course of
training through which he then passed would have been perfect;--his
athletic sports, his battles, his love of dangerous enterprise, gave
every promise of a spirit fit for the most stormy career. But to the
meditative pursuits of poesy, these dispositions seemed, of all others,
the least friendly; and, however they might promise to render him, at
some future time, a subject for bards, gave, assuredly, but little hope
of his shining first among bards himself.

The habits of his life at the university were even still less
intellectual and literary. While a schoolboy, he had read abundantly and
eagerly, though desultorily; but even this discipline of his mind,
irregular and undirected as it was, he had, in a great measure, given
up, after leaving Harrow; and among the pursuits that occupied his
academic hours, those of playing at hazard, sparring, and keeping a bear
and bull-dogs, were, if not the most favourite, at least, perhaps, the
most innocent. His time in London passed equally unmarked either by
mental cultivation or refined amusement. Having no resources in private
society, from his total want of friends and connections, he was left to
live loosely about town among the loungers in coffee-houses; and to
those who remember what his two favourite haunts, Limmer's and
Stevens's, were at that period, it is needless to say that, whatever
else may have been the merits of these establishments, they were
anything but fit schools for the formation of poetic character.

But however incompatible such a life must have been with those habits of
contemplation, by which, and which only, the faculties he had already
displayed could be ripened, or those that were still latent could be
unfolded, yet, in another point of view, the time now apparently
squandered by him, was, in after-days, turned most invaluably to
account. By thus initiating him into a knowledge of the varieties of
human character,--by giving him an insight into the details of society,
in their least artificial form,--in short, by mixing him up, thus early,
with the world, its business and its pleasures, his London life but
contributed its share in forming that wonderful combination which his
mind afterwards exhibited, of the imaginative and the practical