East Cowes, Isle of Wight, where his
father was collector of customs. His early education was undertaken by a
sister; and in 1803 he was sent to Warminister School, in Wiltshire. In
1807 he went to Winchester, where, having entered as a commoner and
afterwards become a scholar of the college, he remained till 1811. In
after life he always cherished a strong Wykehamist feeling, and, during
his headmastership at Rugby, often recurred to his knowledge there first
acquired, of the peculiar constitution of a public school.

He was then, as always, of a shy and retiring disposition; but his
manner as a child, and till his entrance at Oxford, was marked by a
stiffness and formality, the very reverse of the joyousness and
simplicity of his later years. He was unlike those of his own age, with
pursuits peculiar to himself; and the tone and style of his early
letters are such as might have been produced by living chiefly with his
elders, and reading, or hearing read, books suited to a more advanced
age. Both as boy and young man he was remarkable for a difficulty in
early rising amounting almost to a constitutional infirmity; and though
in after life this was overcome by habit, he often said that early
rising was a daily effort to him.

The beginning of some of his later interests may be traced in his
earlier amusements and occupations. He never lost the recollection of
the impression produced upon him by the excitement of naval and military
affairs, of which he naturally saw and heard much by living at Cowes in
the time of the Napoleonic war; and with his playmates he would sail
rival toy fleets or act the battles of the Homeric heroes with
improvised spears and shields. He was extremely fond of ballad poetry,
and his earliest compositions all ran in that direction. At Winchester
he was noted for his forwardness in history and geography; and there
also he gave indications of that mnemonic faculty which in later years
showed itself in minute details, extending to the exact state of the
weather on particular days, or the exact words or passages he had not
seen for twenty years. The period of his home and school education was
too short to exercise much influence on his after life, but he always
looked back upon it with tenderness.

In 1811 he was elected a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; in
1814 he took a first class in classics; in 1815 he was made a Fellow of
Oriel; and he gained the Chancellor's prizes for the Lati