He was such a schoolboy as a discerning master delights in--keen
about everything, bright, docile, popular, excellent at games. He
was in the sixth, moreover, as soon as his age allowed; that is to
say, as soon as he was sixteen; and his pride in everything connected
with the great body which he had already a marked and important
place was unbounded. Very early in his school career the literary
instincts, which had always been present in him, and which his
mother had largely helped to develop by her own restless imaginative
ways of approaching life and the world made themselves felt with
considerable force. Some time before his cousin's letter arrived,
he had been taken with a craze for English poetry, and, but for the
corrective influence of a favorite tutor would probably have thrown
himself into it with the same exclusive passion as he had shown for
subject after subject in his eager a ebullient childhood. His mother
found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the subject, of 'The
Faerie Queene' to a school-friend, in which, with a sincerity which
made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked--

'I can truly say with Pope, that this great work has afforded me
extraordinary pleasure.'

And about the same time, a master who was much interested in the
boy's prospects of getting the school prize for Latin verse, a
subject for which be had always shown a special aptitude, asked him
anxiously, after an Easter holiday, what he had been reading; the
boy ran his hands through his hair, and still keeping his finger
between the leaves, shut a book before him from which he had been
learning by heart, and which was, alas! neither Ovid nor Virgil.