well-meant regulations; who were only anxious
to secure certificates for the 'poll' degree, and whose one aim was to
secure them on the cheapest possible terms. To candidates for honours,
the history school was at best a luxury for which they could rarely
spare time, and my father had to choose between speaking over the heads
of his audience and giving milk and water to babes. The society of the
Cambridge dons in those days was not much to his taste, and he soon gave
up residence there.

About the beginning of 1853 he took a house in Westbourne Terrace, which
became his headquarters. In 1855 he accepted a professorship at
Haileybury, which was then doomed to extinction, only to hold it during
the last three years of the existence of the college. These lectures
sufficiently occupied his strength, and he performed them to the best of
his ability. The lectures upon French history were, however, the last
performance which represented anything like his full powers.

IV. CAMBRIDGE

In October 1847 my brother went into residence at Trinity College,
Cambridge. 'My Cambridge career,' he says, 'was not to me so memorable
or important a period of life as it appears to some people.' He seems to
have extended the qualification to all his early years. 'Few men,' he
says, 'have worked harder than I have for the last thirty-five years,
but I was a very lazy, unsystematic lad up to the age of twenty-two.' He
would sometimes speak of himself as 'one of a slowly ripening race,' and
set little value upon the intellectual acquirements attained during the
immature period. Yet I have sufficiently shown that in some respects he
was even exceptionally developed. From his childhood he had shared the
thoughts of his elders; he had ceased to be a boy when he had left Eton
at sixteen; and he came up to Cambridge far more of a grown man than
nine in ten of his contemporaries. So far, indeed, as his character was
concerned, he had scarcely ever been a child: at Cambridge, as at Eton,
he regarded many of the ambitions of his contemporaries as puerile.
Even the most brilliant undergraduates are sometimes tempted to set an
excessive value upon academical distinction. A senior wranglership
appears to them to be the culminating point of human glory, instead of
the first term in the real battle of life. Fitzjames, far from sharing
this delusion, regarded it, perhaps, with rather too much contempt. His
thoughts were already upon his future career, and