pursuit. At his first term examination in the University he was
first in Classics and first in Mathematics, while he received the
Chancellor's prize for a poem on the Ionian Islands, and another for
his poem on Eustace de St. Pierre.

There is abundant testimony that Hamilton had "a heart for friendship
formed." Among the warmest of the friends whom he made in these
early days was the gifted Maria Edgeworth, who writes to her sister
about "young Mr. Hamilton, an admirable Crichton of eighteen, a real
prodigy of talents, who Dr. Brinkley says may be a second Newton,
quiet, gentle, and simple." His sister Eliza, to whom he was
affectionately attached, writes to him in 1824:--

"I had been drawing pictures of you in my mind in your study at
Cumberland Street with 'Xenophon,' &c., on the table, and you, with
your most awfully sublime face of thought, now sitting down, and now
walking about, at times rubbing your hands with an air of
satisfaction, and at times bursting forth into some very heroical
strain of poetry in an unknown language, and in your own internal
solemn ventriloquist-like voice, when you address yourself to the
silence and solitude of your own room, and indeed, at times, even
when your mysterious poetical addresses are not quite unheard."

This letter is quoted because it refers to a circumstance which all
who ever met with Hamilton, even in his latest years, will remember.
He was endowed with two distinct voices, one a high treble, the other
a deep bass, and he alternately employed these voices not only in
ordinary conversation, but when he was delivering an address on the
profundities of Quaternions to the Royal Irish Academy, or on
similar occasions. His friends had long grown so familiar with this