three sisters were kindly provided for by different members of the
family on both sides.

It was when William was about fifteen that his attention began to be
turned towards scientific subjects. These were at first regarded
rather as a relaxation from the linguistic studies with which he had
been so largely occupied. On November 22nd, 1820, he notes in his
journal that he had begun Newton's "Principia": he commenced also the
study of astronomy by observing eclipses, occultations, and similar
phenomena. When he was sixteen we learn that he had read conic
sections, and that he was engaged in the study of pendulums. After
an attack of illness, he was moved for change to Dublin, and in May,
1822, we find him reading the differential calculus and Laplace's
"Mecanique Celeste." He criticises an important part of Laplace's
work relative to the demonstration of the parallelogram of forces. In
this same year appeared the first gushes of those poems which
afterwards flowed in torrents.

His somewhat discursive studies had, however, now to give place to a
more definite course of reading in preparation for entrance to the
University of Dublin. The tutor under whom he entered, Charles
Boyton, was himself a distinguished man, but he frankly told the
young William that he could be of little use to him as a tutor, for
his pupil was quite as fit to be his tutor. Eliza Hamilton, by whom
this is recorded, adds, "But there is one thing which Boyton would
promise to be to him, and that was a FRIEND; and that one proof he
would give of this should be that, if ever he saw William beginning
to be UPSET by the sensation he would excite, and the notice he would
attract, he would tell him of it." At the beginning of his college
career he distanced all his competitors in every intellectual