William Cory, born William Johnson, left behind him a modest literary corpus but a vast reputation as poet, teacher, and scholar. Because of his single-minded devotion to pedagogy, Cory is known as the singer of the transmuting power of a great school over youth at the threshold of life. Yet within his admittedly narrow ambit, Cory goes beyond the celebration of school life, for he directs a vigorous yet graceful imagination to the perennial theme of defining the value of human existence in terms of unaffected human relationships.

Cory was born on 9 January 1823, the younger son of Charles and Theresa Furse Johnson of Torrington in Devonshire. In 1832 he was elected king's scholar to Eton, where he capped a brilliant career by winning the Newcastle scholarship in 1841. On 23 February 1842 he was elected to a scholarship at King's College, Cambridge, where he distinguished himself both by his classical scholarship and...