hat happened in a scramble among
his play-fellows, occasioned another suspension of his studies. During
the twelvemonth which he now passed at home with his mother, he became
so conversant with several writers in his own language, especially
Dryden and Pope, that he set himself about making imitations of them.

On his return to Harrow, no allowance was made for the inevitable
consequences of this interruption; he was replaced in the class with
those boys whose classical learning had been progressive while his was
stationary, or rather retrograde, and unmerited chastisement was
inflicted on him for his inferiority to those with whom he had wanted
the means of maintaining an equality. Impelled either by fear, by shame,
or by emulation, he laboured hard in private to repair his losses: of
his own accord recurred to the rudiments of the grammar; and was so
diligent that he speedily outstripped all his juvenile competitors.

In his twelfth year he entered into a scheme for representing a play in
conjunction with his schoolfellows; but instead of seeking his Dramatis
Personae among the heroes of Homer, as Pope had done in his boyhood,
Jones, by a remarkable effort of memory, committed to paper what he
retained of Shakspeare's Tempest, which he had read at his mother's; and
himself sustained the part of Prospero in that Comedy. Meanwhile, his
poetical faculty did not lie dormant. He turned into English verse all
Virgil's Eclogues and several of Ovid's Epistles; and wrote a Tragedy on
the fable of Meleager, which was acted during the holidays by himself
and his comrades, and in which he sustained the character of the hero. A
short specimen of the drama is preserved. The language brings to our
recollection that of the Mock Tragedy in Hamlet.

When the other boys were at their sports, Jones continued to linger over
his book, or, if he mingled in their diversions, his favourite objects
were still uppermost in his thoughts; he directed his playmates to
divide the fields into compartments to which he gave the names of the
several Grecian republics; allotted to each their political station; and
"wielding at will the fierce democracies," arranged the complicated
concerns of peace and war, attack and defence, councils, harangues, and
negociations. Dr. Thackeray was compelled to own that "if his pupil were
left naked and friendless on Salisbury plain, he would yet find his way
to fame and riches."

On the resignation of that master,