growth; but there can rarely have been a boy whose moral and mental
health had more to gain by the combined discipline and freedom of a
public school. His home training was made to include everything which
in those days went to the production of an accomplished gentleman, and
a great deal therefore that was physically good. He learned music,
singing, dancing, riding, boxing, and fencing, and excelled in the
more active of these pursuits. The study of music was also serious, and
carried on under two masters. Mr. John Relfe, author of a valuable work
on counterpoint, was his instructor in thorough-bass; Mr. Abel, a pupil
of Moscheles, in execution. He wrote music for songs which he himself
sang; among them Donne's 'Go and catch a falling star'; Hood's 'I will
not have the mad Clytie'; Peacock's 'The mountain sheep are sweeter';
and his settings, all of which he subsequently destroyed, were, I am
told, very spirited. His education seems otherwise to have been purely
literary. For two years, from the age of fourteen to that of sixteen,
he studied with a French tutor, who, whether this was intended or not,
imparted to him very little but a good knowledge of the French language
and literature. In his eighteenth year he attended, for a term or two,
a Greek class at the London University. His classical and other
reading was probably continued. But we hear nothing in the programme of
mathematics, or logic--of any, in short, of those subjects which train,
even coerce, the thinking powers, and which were doubly requisite for
a nature in which the creative imagination was predominant over all the
other mental faculties, great as these other faculties were. And, even
as poet, he suffered from this omission: since the involutions and
overlappings of thought and phrase, which occur in his earlier and again
in his latest works, must have been partly due to his never learning to
follow the processes of more normally constituted minds. It would be
a great error to suppose that they ever arose from the absence of a
meaning clearly felt, if not always clearly thought out, by himself. He