deposits of that course of philosophic reading over which, says the
Memoir, 'I wasted a good deal of time in 1862, but managed also to give
myself much mental training.'

The determination to abandon mathematics for a line of study more germane
to that career of which he already had some vision met with no resistance
from his people; but it did not altogether please the college authorities.
He wrote to old Mr. Dilke:

"When I told Hopkins" (his tutor) "that I was not going out in
mathematics, he was taken aback, and seemed very sorry. He urged me to
_read law_, but still to go out as a high senior optime, which he says
I could be, without reading more than a very small quantity of
mathematics every day. My objection to this was that I knew myself
better than he did; that were I to go in for mathematics, I should be
as high in that tripos as my talents would let me, and that my law and
my life's purpose would suffer in consequence.

"He said--'You will be very sorry if it happens that you are not first
legalist of your year--that is the only place in the Law Tripos that
you can be content with--and yet remember you have Shee in your year,
who is always a dangerous adversary, and who starts with some little
knowledge on the subject.'

"I said I should read with Shee, and make him understand that I was
intended by Nature to beat him."

The dangerous Shee had been thus announced in a letter of February, 1863:
"Shee--son of the well-known Serjeant, [Footnote: Mr. Serjeant Shee was
later a Judge--the first Roman Catholic since the time of the Stuarts to