trash that ever consumed ink and paper manufactured for better
things, had in his eyes an authority which led him to look upon
misquotation as a species of minor sacrilege.

With these endowments, sharpened by an insatiable curiosity, from
his fourteenth year onward he was permitted to roam almost at
will over the whole expanse of literature. He composed little
beyond his school exercises, which themselves bear signs of
having been written in a perfunctory manner. At this period he
had evidently no heart in anything but his reading. Before
leaving Shelford for Aspenden he had already invoked the epic
muse for the last time.

"Arms and the man I sing, who strove in vain
To save green Erin from a foreign reign."

The man was Roderic, king of Connaught, whom he got tired of
singing before he had well completed two books of the poem.
Thenceforward he appears never to have struck his lyre, except in
the first enthusiasm aroused by the intelligence of some
favourable turn of fortune on the Continent. The flight of
Napoleon from Russia was celebrated in a "Pindaric Ode" duly
distributed into strophes and antistrophes; and, when the allies
entered Paris, the school put his services into requisition to
petition for a holiday in honour of the event. He addressed his
tutor in a short poem, which begins with a few sonorous and
effective couplets, grows more and more like the parody on
Fitzgerald in "Rejected Addresses," and ends in a peroration of
which the intention is unquestionably mock-heroic: