ections. As with Milton, who spent over five
years at Cambridge and then five more in study and retirement at Horton,
the long years of self-education were profitable and left their mark on
his life. His first strong religious impulse he himself dates back to
his school-days at Harrow, when (as is now recorded in a mural tablet
on the spot) in walking up the street one day he was shocked by the
indignities of a pauper funeral. The drunken bearers, staggering up the
hill and swearing over the coffin, so appalled him that the sight
remained branded on his memory and he determined to devote his life to
the service of the poor. But one such shock would have achieved little,
if the decision had not been strengthened by years of thought and
resolution. His tendency to self-criticism is seen in the entry in his
diary for April, 1826 (his twenty-fifth birthday). He blames himself for
indulging in dreams and for having performed so little; but he himself
admits that the visions were all of a noble character, and we know what
abundant fruit they produced in the sixty years of active effort which
were to follow. The man who a year later could write sincerely in his
diary, 'Immortality has ceased to be a longing with me. I desire to be
useful in my generation,' had been little harmed by a few years of
dreaming dreams, and had little need to be afraid of having made a false
start in life.

When he entered the House of Commons as member for Woodstock in 1826,
Lord Ashley had strong Conservative instincts, a fervid belief in the
British constitution, and an unbounded admiration for the Duke of
Wellington, whose Peninsula victories had fired his enthusiasm at
Harrow. It was to his wing of the Conservative party that Ashley
attached himself; and it was the duke who, succeeding to the premiership
on the premature death of Canning, gave him his first office, a post on
the India Board of Control. The East India Company with its board of
directors (abolished in 1858) still ruled India, but was since 1778
subject in many ways to the control of the British Parliament, and the
board to which Lord Ashley now belonged exercised some of the functions
since committed to the Secretary of State for India. He set himself
conscientiously to study the interests of India, but over the work of
his department he had little chance of winning distinction. In fact his
first prominent speech was on the Reform of Lunatic Asylums, not an easy
subject for a new