ys shown a special aptitude, asked him anxiously,
after an Easter holiday, what he had been reading; the boy ran his hands
through his hair, and still keeping his finger between the leaves, shut
a book before him from which he had been learning by heart, and which
was, alas! neither Ovid nor Virgil.

'I have just finished Belial! 'he said, with a sigh of satisfaction,
'and am beginning Beelzebub.'

A craze of this kind was naturally followed by a feverish period of
juvenile authorship, when the house was littered over with stanzas from
the opening canto of a great poem on Columbus, or with moral essays in
the manner of Pope, castigating the vices of the time with an energy
which sorely tried the gravity of the mother whenever she was called
upon, as she invariably was, to play audience to the young poet. At the
same time the classics absorbed in reality their full share of this fast
developing power. Virgil and Aeschylus appealed to the same fibres, the
same susceptibilities, as Milton and Shakspeare, and, the boy's quick
imaginative sense appropriated Greek and Latin life with the same ease
which it showed in possessing itself of that bygone English life whence
sprung the 'Canterbury Tales,' or 'As You Like It.' So that his tutor,
who was much attached to him, and who made it one of his main objects
in life to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical
_minutiae_, began about the time of Sir Mowbray's letter to prophesy very
smooth things indeed to his mother as to his future success at college,
the possibility of his getting the famous St. Anselm's scholarship, and
so on.

Evidently such a youth, was not likely to depend for the attainment of
a foothold in life on a piece of family privileges. The world was all
before him where to choose, Mrs. Elsmere thought proudly to herself,
as her mother's fancy wandered rashly through the coming years. And for
many reasons she secretly allowed herself to hope that he would find
for himself some other post of ministry in a very various world than the
vicarage of Murewell.

So she wrote a civil letter of acknowledgment to Sir Mowbray, informing
him that the intentions of his great-uncle should be communicated to the
boy when he should be of fit age to consider them, and that meanwhile
she was obliged to him for pointing out the procedure by which she might
lay hands on the legacy bequeathed to her in trust for her son, the
income of which would now be doubly