Willoughby, Tom Dale and the rest. He joined in their pranks, and
contributed to their amusement with his ready good-humour and unflagging
drollery.

Mr. Dale told him there was plenty of time before October, and no fear
about his passing, if he worked hard. He found the work easy, except
epigram-writing, which he thought "excessively stupid and laborious,"
but helped himself out, when scholarship failed, with native wit. Some
of his exercises remain, not very brilliant Latinity; some he saucily
evaded, thus:

"Subject: _Non sapere maximum est malum._

"Non sapere est grave; sed, cum dura epigrammata oportet
Scribere, tunc sentis præcipue esse malum."

In Switzerland and Italy, during the autumn of 1835, he had made a great
many drawings, carefully outlined in pencil or pen on gray paper, and
sparsely touched with body colour, in direct imitation of the Prout
lithographs. Prout's original coloured sketches he had seen, no doubt,
in the exhibition; but he does not seem to have thought of imitating
them, for his work in this kind was all intended to be for illustration
and not for framing. The "Italy" vignettes likewise, with all their
inspiration, suggested to him only pen-etching; he was hardly conscious
that somewhere there existed the tiny, coloured pictures that Turner had
made for the engraver. Still, now that he could draw really well, his
father, who painted in water-colours himself, complied with the demand
for better teaching than Runciman's, went straight to the President of
the Old Water-Colour Society, and engaged him for the usual course of
half a dozen lessons at a guinea a piece. Copley Fielding could draw