tt. _The Battle of Lake Regillus_
and _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, the impeachment of Warren Hastings
and the death of Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, are samples of the literature
with which my mind was stored. Every boy, I suppose, attempts to imitate
what he admires, and I was eternally scribbling. When I was eleven, I
began a novel, of which the heroine was a modern Die Vernon. At twelve,
I took to versification, for which the swinging couplets of _English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ supplied the model. Fragments of prose and
verse came thick and fast. When I was thirteen, I made my first
appearance in print; with a set of verses on a Volunteer Encampment,
which really were not at all bad; and at fourteen I published
(anonymously) a religious tract, which had some success in Evangelical
circles.

The effect of Harrow was both to stimulate and to discipline my taste
for literature. It was my good fortune to be taught my Sophocles and
Euripides, Tacitus and Virgil, by scholars who had the literary sense,
and could enrich school-lessons with all the resources of a generous
culture. My sixteenth and seventeenth years brought me a real and
conscious growth in the things of the mind, and with that period of my
life I must always gratefully associate the names of Frederic Farrar,
Edward Bowen, and Arthur Watson.[49]

Meanwhile I was not only learning, but also practising. My teachers with
one accord incited me to write. Essay-writing formed a regular part of
our work in school and pupil-room, and I composed a great deal for my
own amusement. I wrote both prose and verse, and verse in a great many
metres; but it was soon borne in upon me--conclusively after I had been
beaten for the Prize Poem[50]--that the Muse of Poetry was not mine. In
prose, I was more successful. My work for _The Harrovian_ gave me
constant practice, and I twice won the School-Prize for an English
Essay. In writing, I indulged to the full my taste for resonant and
rolling sound; and my style was ludicrously rhetorical. The subject for
the Prize Essay in 1872 was "Parliamentary Oratory: its History and
Influence," and the discourse which I composed on that attractive theme
has served me from that day to this as the basis of a popular lecture.
The "Young Lion" of the _Daily Telegraph_ thus "roared" over my
performance--

"The English Essay now takes a higher place on Speech Day than it did in
the old season; and the essay which was crowned yesterday was n