myself one of the three who formed the
highest class. Now I myself was familiar with Sophocles, who once had
been so shadowy a name in my ear. But, strange to say, now in my
sixteenth year, I cared nothing at all for the glory of Latin verse. All
the business of school was slight and trivial in my eyes. Costing me not
an effort, it could not engage any part of my attention; that was now
swallowed up altogether by the literature of my native land. I still
reverenced the Grecian drama, as always I must. But else I cared little
then for classical pursuits. A deeper spell had mastered me; and I lived
only in those bowers where deeper passions spoke.

Here, however, it was that began another and more important struggle. I
was drawing near to seventeen, and, in a year after _that_, would arrive
the usual time for going to Oxford. To Oxford my guardians made no
objection; and they readily agreed to make the allowance then
universally regarded as the _minimum_ for an Oxford student, viz. L200
per annum. But they insisted, as a previous condition, that I should
make a positive and definitive choice of a profession. Now I was well
aware that, if I _did_ make such a choice, no law existed, nor could any
obligation be created through deeds or signature, by which I could
finally be compelled into keeping my engagement. But this evasion did
not suit me. Here, again, I felt indignantly that the principle of the
attempt was unjust. The object was certainly to do me service by saving
money, since, if I selected the bar as my profession, it was contended
by some persons, (misinformed, however,) that not Oxford, but a special
pleader's office, would be my proper destination; but I cared not for
arguments of that sort. Oxford I was determined to make my home; and
also to bear my future course utterly untrammeled by promises that I
might repent. Soon came the catastrophe of this struggle. A little
before my seventeenth birthday, I walked off one lovely summer morning
to North Wales--rambled there for months--and, finally, under some
obscure hopes of raising money on my personal security, I went up to
London. Now I was in my eighteenth year; and, during this period it was
that I passed through that trial of severe distress, of which I gave
some account in my former Confessions. Having a motive, however, for
glancing backwards briefly at that period in the present series, I will
do so at this point.

I saw in one journal an insinuation that