should be at college. His impressionable temperament, and the power
he had occasionally shown of absorbing himself in a subject till it
produced in him a fit of intense continuous brooding, unfavorable to
health and nervous energy, all warned her not to supply him, at a period
of rapid mental and bodily growth, with any fresh stimulus to the sense
of responsibility. As a boy he had always shown himself religiously
susceptible to a certain extent, and his mother's religious likes and
dislikes had invariably found in him a blind and chivalrous support.
He was content to be with her, to worship with her, and to feel that no
reluctance or resistance divided his heart from hers. But there had
been nothing specially noteworthy or precocious about his religious
development, and at sixteen or seventeen, in spite of his affectionate
compliance, and his natural reverence for all persons and beliefs in
authority, his mother was perfectly aware that many other things in
his life were more real to him than religion. And on this point, at any
rate, she was certainly not the person to force him.

He was such a schoolboy as a discerning master delights in--keen about
everything, bright, docile, popular, excellent at games. He was in the
sixth, moreover, as soon as his age allowed; that is to say, as soon
as he was sixteen; and his pride in everything connected with the great
body which he had already a marked and important place was unbounded.
Very early in his school career the literary instincts, which had always
been present in him, and which his mother had largely helped to develop
by her own restless imaginative ways of approaching life and the world
made themselves felt with considerable force. Some time before his
cousin's letter arrived, he had been taken with a craze for English
poetry, and, but for the corrective influence of a favorite tutor would
probably have thrown himself into it with the same exclusive passion
as he had shown for subject after subject in his eager a ebullient
childhood. His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the
subject, of 'The Faerie Queene' to a school-friend, in which, with a
sincerity which made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked--

'I can truly say with Pope, that this great work has afforded me
extraordinary pleasure.'

And about the same time, a master who was much interested in the boy's
prospects of getting the school prize for Latin verse, a subject for
which he had alwa