ould
probably have thrown himself into it with the same exclusive passion as
he had shown for subject after subject in his eager ebullient childhood.
His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the subject of
_The Faerie Queene_ to a school-friend, in which, with a sincerity which
made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked--

'I can truly say with Pope, that this great work has afforded me
extraordinary pleasure.'

And about the same time, a master who was much interested in the boy's
prospects of getting the school prize for Latin verse, a subject for
which he had always shown a special aptitude, asked him anxiously, after
an Easter holiday, what he had been reading; the boy ran his hands
through his hair, and still keeping his finger between the leaves, shut
a book before him from which he had been learning by heart, and which
was, alas! neither Ovid nor Virgil.

'I have just finished Belial!' he said, with a sigh of satisfaction,
'and am beginning Beelzebub.'

A craze of this kind was naturally followed by a feverish period of
juvenile authorship, when the house was littered over with stanzas from
the opening canto of a great poem on Columbus, or with moral essays in
the manner of Pope, castigating the vices of the time with an energy
which sorely tried the gravity of the mother whenever she was called
upon, as she invariably was, to play audience to the young poet. At the
same time the classics absorbed in reality their full share of this fast
developing power. Virgil and AEschylus appealed to the same fibres, the
same susceptibilities, as Milton and Shakspeare, and the boy's quick
imaginative sense appropriated Greek and Latin life with the same ease
which it showed in possessing itself of that bygone English life whence
sprung the _Canterbury Tales_, or _As You Like It_. So that his tutor,
who was much attached to him, and who made it one of his main objects in
life to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical
_minutiae_, began about the time of Sir Mowbray's letter to prophesy very
smooth things indeed to his mother as to his future success at college,
the possibility of his getting the famous St. Anselm's scholarship, and
so on.

Evidently such a youth was not likely to depend for the attainment of a
foothold in life on a piece of family privilege. The world was all
before him where to choose, Mrs. Elsmere thought proudly to herself, as
her mother's fancy wandered rashly thro