call on Charles Roe or Frank Ellis to corroborate my small anecdotes,
but I could till lately on Sir William Knighton and one or two more. In
a crowd of five hundred scholars (Russell's average number, afterwards
much diminished, until Godalming brought up the tale), there must be
many still extant and of eminence whom I would name if I did but know
them. Certainly, yes, Trevelyan was my next neighbour in the "emeriti,"
and there was Hebert, the one distinguished in the State, the other in
the Church; also Cole, and his noble chief of Enniskillen, whom I have
visited at Florence Court; and Walford, our great genealogist, with many
more; among the more recent dead, let me mention my good friend
Archibald Mathison, lately an Indian Judge, and Robert Curzon, and
Arthur Helps, the historian of Mexico. Thackeray I knew then but very
slightly, as he was a lower schoolboy, and John Leech not at all,
because he was a day boy, seeing that the upper school was made to keep
foolishly aloof from all such; however, in after years I made good
acquaintance with both of those true geniuses, and had Leech down to
Albury, and to illustrate my tales, whilst I have several times
compared judgments with Thackeray as to Doctor Birch and his young
friends and other scholia.

For the matter of my practical education at Charterhouse, I like others
went through the usual course, though without much distinction. I never
gained a prize, albeit I tried for some, by certain tame didactic poems
on the Tower, Carthage, and Jerusalem, and as I couldn't as a stammerer
speak in school, high places were out of my reach. Like others, however,
I learned by heart all Horace's odes and epodes, the Ajax and the
Antigone of Sophocles, and other like efforts of memory, almost useless
in after life, except for capping quotations, and thereby being thought
a pedant by the display of schoolboy erudition. How often have I wished
that the years wasted over Latin verses and Greek plays had been