had secured the notice of his teachers, one circumstance
sufficiently proves. A philosophical society was started under the
presidency of Mamiani, 'one of the examiners and one of the leaders
of the Moderate party'; and out of five promising students brought
forward by the professors to attend the sittings and present
essays, Signor Flaminio was one. I cannot find that he ever read
an essay; and indeed I think his hands were otherwise too full. He
found his fellow-students 'not such a bad set of chaps,' and
preferred the Piedmontese before the Genoese; but I suspect he
mixed not very freely with either. Not only were his days filled
with university work, but his spare hours were fully dedicated to
the arts under the eye of a beloved task-mistress. He worked hard
and well in the art school, where he obtained a silver medal 'for a
couple of legs the size of life drawn from one of Raphael's
cartoons.' His holidays were spent in sketching; his evenings,
when they were free, at the theatre. Here at the opera he
discovered besides a taste for a new art, the art of music; and it
was, he wrote, 'as if he had found out a heaven on earth.' 'I am
so anxious that whatever he professes to know, he should really
perfectly possess,' his mother wrote, 'that I spare no pains';
neither to him nor to myself, she might have added. And so when he
begged to be allowed to learn the piano, she started him with
characteristic barbarity on the scales; and heard in consequence
'heart-rending groans' and saw 'anguished claspings of hands' as he
lost his way among their arid intricacies.

In this picture of the lad at the piano, there is something, for
the period, girlish. He was indeed his mother's boy; and it was
fortunate his mother was not altogether feminine. She gave her son
a womanly delicacy in morals, to a man's taste - to his own taste