onsequence, became Duke of
Bedford.

[Sidenote: SCHOOLDAYS AT WESTMINSTER]

From Sunbury the motherless boy was sent with his elder brother to
Westminster, in 1803, and the same year the Duke married Lady Georgiana
Gordon, a daughter of the fourth Duke of Gordon, and her kindness to her
stepchildren was marked and constant. Westminster School at the
beginning of the century was an ill-disciplined place, in which fighting
and fagging prevailed, and its rough and boisterous life taxed to the
utmost the mettle of the plucky little fellow. He seems to have made no
complaint, but to have taken his full share in the rough-and-tumble
sports of his comrades in a school which has given many distinguished
men to the literature and public life of England: as, for instance, the
younger Vane--whom Milton extolled--Ben Jonson and Dryden, Prior and
Locke, Cowper and Southey, Gibbon and Warren Hastings.

He learnt Latin at Westminster, and was kept to the work of translation,
but he used to declare somewhat ruefully in after-days that he had as a
schoolboy to devote the half-holidays to learning arithmetic and
writing, and these homely arts were taught him by a pedagogue who seems
to have kept a private school in Great Dean's Yard. Many years later
Earl Russell dictated to the Countess some reminiscences of his early
days, and since Lady Russell has granted access to them, the following
passages transcribed from her own manuscript will be read with
interest:--'My education, for various reasons, was not a very regular
one. It began, indeed, in the usual English way by my going to a very
bad private school at Sunbury, and my being transferred to a public
school at Westminster at ten or eleven. But I never entered the upper
school. The hard life of a fag--for in those days it was a hard
life--and the unwholesome food disagreed with me so much that my
stepmother, the Duchess of Bedford, insisted that I should be taken away
and sent to a private tutor.' At Westminster School physical hardihood
was always encouraged. 'If two boys were engaged to fight during the
time of school, those boys who wanted to see the fight had to leave
school for the purpose.' At this early period a passion for the theatre
possessed him, drawing him to Drury Lane or Covent Garden whenever an
opportunity occurred; and this kind of relaxation retained a
considerable hold upon him throughout the greater portion of his life.
Even as a child he was a bit of a phi