et every whole holiday or half, and went up Salt
Hill to bully the fat waiter, eat toasted cheese, and drink egg-wine.

SCHOOL DAYS

He started, as we have already seen, in middle fourth form. In the
spring of 1822 Hawtrey said to him: 'Continue to do as well as this, and
I will send you up for good again before the fourth of June.' Before the
end of June, he tells his sailor brother of his success: 'It far exceeds
the most sanguine expectations I ever entertained. I have got into the
remove between the fourth and fifth forms. I have been sent up for good
a second time, and have taken seven places.' In the summer of 1823 he
announces that he has got into the fifth form after taking sixteen
places, and here instead of fagging he acquires the blessed power
himself to fag. In passing he launches, for the first recorded time,
against the master of the remove from which he has just been promoted,
an invective that in volume and intensity anticipates the wrath of later
attacks on Neapolitan kings and Turkish sultans.

His letters written from Eton breathe in every line the warm breath of
family affection, and of all those natural pieties that had so firm a
root in him from the beginning to the end. Of the later store of genius
and force that the touch of time was so soon to kindle into full glow,
they gave but little indication. We smile at the precocious _copia
fandi_ that at thirteen describes the language of an admonishing
acquaintance as 'so friendly, manly, sound, and disinterested that
notwithstanding his faults I must always think well of him.' He sends
contributions to his brother's scrap-book, and one of the first of them,
oddly enough, in view of one of the great preoccupations of his later
life, is a copy of Lord Edward Fitzgerald's stanzas on the night of his
arrest:--

'O Ireland, my country, the hour
Of thy pride and thy splendour has passed.
And the chain which was spurned in thy moment of power,
Hangs heavy around thee at last.'

The temper and dialect of evangelical religion are always there. A
friend of the family dies, and the boy pours out his regret, but after
all what is the merely natural death of Dr. N. compared with the awful
state of a certain clergyman, also an intimate friend, who has not only
been guilty of attending a fancy ball, but has followed that vicious
prelude by even worse enormities, unnamed, that surely cannot escape the
vigilance and th