the date of composition.

INTRODUCTION

WILLIAM CORY (Johnson) was born at Torrington in Devonshire, on January
9, 1823. He was the son of Charles William Johnson, a merchant, who
retired at the early age of thirty, with a modest competence, and
married his cousin, Theresa Furse, of Halsdon, near Torrington, to whom
he had long been attached. He lived a quiet, upright, peaceable life
at Torrington, content with little, and discharging simple, kindly,
neighbourly duties, alike removed from ambition and indolence. William
Cory had always a deep love of his old home, a strong sense of local
sanctities and tender associations. "I hope you will always feel," his
mother used to say, "wherever you live, that Torrington belongs to
you." He said himself, in later years, "I want to be a Devon man and a
Torrington man." His memory lingered over the vine-shaded verandah, the
jessamine that grew by the balustrade of the steps, the broad-leaved
myrtle that covered the wall of the little yard.

The boy was elected on the foundation at Eton in 1832, little guessing
that it was to be his home for forty years. He worked hard at school,
became a first-rate classical scholar, winning the Newcastle Scholarship
in 1841, and being elected Scholar of King's in 1842. He seems to have
been a quiet, retiring boy, with few intimate friends, respected for
his ability and his courtesy, living a self-contained, bookish life,
yet with a keen sense of school patriotism--though he had few pleasant
memories of his boyhood.

Honours came to him fast at Cambridge. He won the Chancellor's English
Medal with a poem on Plato in 1843, the Craven Scholarship in 1844. In
those days Kingsmen did not enter for the Tripos, but received a degree,
without examination, by ancient privilege. He succeeded to a Fellowship
in 1845, and in the same year was appointed to a Mastership at Eton by
Dr. Hawtrey. At Cambridge he seems to have read widely, to have thought
much, and to have been interested in social questions. Till that time
he had been an unreflecting Tory and a strong High Churchman, but he
now adopted more Liberal principles, and for the rest of his life was a
convinced Whig. The underlying principle of Whiggism, as he understood
it, was a firm faith in human reason. Thus, in a letter of 1875, he
represents the Whigs as saying to their adversaries, "You are in a
majority now: if I were an ultra-democrat or counter of noses, I
should submit to you as ha