nd in
exercising those powers of argumentative discussion, which now
displayed themselves as eminently characteristic of his mind. It
was a necessary consequence that he declined still more from the
usual paths of study, and abated perhaps somewhat of his regard
for the writers of antiquity. It must not be understood,
nevertheless, as most of those who read these pages will be
aware, that he ever lost his sensibility to those ever-living
effusions of genius which the ancient languages preserve. He
loved AEschylus and Sophocles (to Euripides he hardly did
justice), Lucretius and Virgil; if he did not seem so much drawn
towards Homer as might at first be expected, this may probably
be accounted for by his increasing taste for philosophical
poetry.

"In the early part of 1827, Arthur took a part in the Eton
Miscellany, a periodical publication, in which some of his
friends in the debating society were concerned. He wrote in
this, besides a few papers in prose, a little poem on a story
connected with the Lake of Killarney. It has not been thought by
the Editor advisable, upon the whole, to reprint these lines;
though, in his opinion, they bear very striking marks of
superior powers. This was almost the first poetry that Arthur
had written, except the childish tragedies above mentioned. No
one was ever less inclined to the trick of versifying. Poetry
with him was not an amusement, but the natural and almost
necessary language of genuine emotion; and it was not till the
discipline of serious reflection, and the approach of manhood,
gave a reality and intenseness to such emotions, that he learned
the capacities of his own genius. That he was a poet by nature,
these Remains will sufficiently prove; but certainly he was far
removed from being a versifier by nature; nor was he probably
able to perform, what he scarce ever attempted, to write easily
and elegantly on an ordinary subject. The lines on the story of
Pygmalion are so far an exception, that they arose out of a
momentary amusement of society; but he could not avoid, even in
these, his own grave tone of poetry.

"Upon leaving Eton in the summer of 1827, he accompanied his
parents to the Continent, and passed eight months in Italy. This
introduction to new scenes of nature and art, and to new sources
of intellectual