myself; yet the one whom I loved the most, and the one whose future
destiny was the most intertwined with my own.

I was in the head class when I left Eton. As I was reckoned an uncommonly
well-educated boy, it may not be ungratifying to the admirers of the
present system of education to pause here for a moment, and recal what I
then knew. I could make twenty Latin verses in half an hour; I could
construe, without an English translation, all the easy Latin authors, and
many of the difficult ones, with it: I could read Greek fluently, and
even translate it though the medium of a Latin version at the bottom of
the page. I was thought exceedingly clever, for I had only been eight
years acquiring all this fund of information, which, as one can never
recal it in the world, you have every right to suppose that I had
entirely forgotten before I was five and twenty. As I was never taught a
syllable of English during this period; as when I once attempted to read
Pope's poems, out of school hours, I was laughed at, and called "a sap;"
as my mother, when I went to school, renounced her own instructions; and
as, whatever school-masters may think to the contrary, one learns nothing
now-a-days by inspiration: so of everything which relates to English
literature, English laws, and English history (with the exception of the
said story of Queen Elizabeth and Lord Essex,) you have the same right to
suppose that I was, at the age of eighteen, when I left Eton, in the
profoundest ignorance.

At this age, I was transplanted to Cambridge, where I bloomed for two
years in the blue and silver of a fellow commoner of Trinity. At the end
of that time (being of royal descent) I became entitled to an honorary
degree. I suppose the term is in contradistinction to an honourable
degree, which is obtained by pale men in spectacles and cotton stockings,
after thirty-six months of intense application.