me (for there were six hundred of us, and his ward was not mine), I
thought him the smallest boy that could ever have attained to so
distinguished an eminence. He was little in person, little in face, and
he had a singularly juvenile cast of features, even for one so _petite_.
It was MITCHELL, the translator of Aristophanes. He had really attained
his position prematurely. I rose afterward to be next to him in the
school; and from a grudge that existed between us, owing probably to a
reserve, which I thought pride, on his part, and to an ardency which he
may have considered frivolous on mine, we became friends. Circumstances
parted us in after life: I became a reformist, and he a quarterly
reviewer; but he sent me kindly remembrances not long before he died. I
did not know he was declining; and it will ever be a pain to me to
reflect, that delay conspired with accident to hinder my sense of it
from being known to him, especially as I learned that he had not been so
prosperous as I supposed. He had his weaknesses as well as myself, but
they were mixed with conscientious and noble qualities. Zealous as he
was for aristocratical government, he was no indiscriminate admirer of
persons in high places; and, though it would have bettered his views in
life, he had declined taking orders, from nicety of religious scruple.
Of his admirable scholarship I need say nothing.
Equally good scholar, but of a less zealous temperament was BARNES, who
stood next me on the deputy-Grecian form, and who was afterward
identified with the sudden and striking increase of the _Times_
newspaper in fame and influence. He was very handsome when young, with a
profile of Grecian regularity; and was famous among us for a certain
dispassionate humor, for his admiration of the works of Fielding, and
for his delight, nevertheless, in pushing a narrative to its utmost, and
drawing upon his stores of fancy for intensifying it; an amusement for
which he possessed an understood privilege. It was painful in after life
to see his good looks swallowed up in corpulency, and his once handsome
mouth thrusting its under lip out, and panting with asthma. I believe he
was originally so well constituted, in point of health and bodily
feeling, that he fancied he could go on all his life without taking any
of the usual methods to preserve his comfort. The editorship of the
_Times_, which turned his night into day, and would have been a trying
burden to any man, comple
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