nd attended sittings of the Legislative Assembly, and
was especially interested by proceedings in the French law-courts. He
kept the May term of 1851 at Cambridge, and went out in the 'Poll.'
Judging from the performances of his rivals, he would probably have
been in the lower half of the first class in the Classical Tripos.
Although his last months at Cambridge were not cheering, he retained a
feeling for the place very unlike his feeling towards Eton. He had now
at least found himself firmly on his own legs, measured his strength
against other competitors, and made lasting friendships with some of the
strongest. It had been, he says, 'my greatest ambition to get a
fellowship at Trinity, but I got it at last, however, for I was elected
an honorary Fellow in the autumn of 1885. I have had my share of
compliments, but I never received one which gave me half so much
pleasure.' He visited Cambridge in later years and was my guest, and
long afterwards the guest of his friend Maine, at certain Christmas
festivities in Trinity Hall. He speaks in the warmest terms of his
appreciation of the place, 'old and dignified, yet fresh and vigorous.'
Nearly his last visit was in the autumn of 1885, when he gave a dinner
to the apostles, of whom his son James was then a member.

Fitzjames's friends were naturally surprised at his throwing up the
game. Most of them set, as I have intimated, a higher value upon
academical honours, considered by themselves, than he ever admitted to
be just. Possibly they exaggerated a little the disgust which was
implied by his absolute abandonment of the course. And yet, I find the
impression among those who saw most of him at the time, that the
disappointment was felt with great keenness. The explanation is given, I
think, in some remarks made by my father to Mr Watson. My father held
that the University system of distributing honours was very faulty. Men,
he said, wanted all the confidence they could acquire in their own
powers for the struggle of life. Whatever braced and stimulated
self-reliance was good. The honour system encouraged the few who
succeeded and inflicted upon the rest a 'demoralising sense of
failure.' I have no doubt that my father was, in fact, generalising from
the case of Fitzjames. What really stung the young man was a more or
less dim foreboding of the difficulties which were to meet him in the
world at large. He was not one of the men fitted for easy success. The
successful man i