are in, or what family they are of, how much they have a-year, or where
they live. Now, on no spirit had the influence of Coningsby, already the
favourite, and soon probably to become the idol, of the school, fallen
more effectually than on that of Millbank, though it was an influence that
no one could suspect except its votary or its victim.

At school, friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the
soul. All loves of after-life can never bring its rapture, or its
wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so
crushing and so keen! What tenderness and what devotion; what illimitable
confidence; infinite revelations of inmost thoughts; what ecstatic present
and romantic future; what bitter estrangements and what melting
reconciliations; what scenes of wild recrimination, agitating
explanations, passionate correspondence; what insane sensitiveness, and
what frantic sensibility; what earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of
the soul are confined in that simple phrase, a schoolboy's friendship!
Tis some indefinite recollection of these mystic passages of their young
emotion that makes grey-haired men mourn over the memory of their
schoolboy days. It is a spell that can soften the acerbity of political
warfare, and with its witchery can call forth a sigh even amid the callous
bustle of fashionable saloons.

The secret of Millbank's life was a passionate admiration and affection
for Coningsby. Pride, his natural reserve, and his father's injunctions,
had, however, hitherto successfully combined to restrain the slightest
demonstration of these sentiments. Indeed, Coningsby and himself were
never companions, except in school, or in some public game. The demeanour
of Coningsby gave no encouragement to intimacy to one, who, under any
circumstances, would have required considerable invitation to open
himself. So Millbank fed in silence on a cherished idea. It was his