When he left us,—­I think at fourteen years of age,—­he was apprenticed to Mr. Thomas Hammond, a medical man, residing in Church Street, Edmonton, and exactly two miles from Enfield.  This arrangement appeared to give him satisfaction; and I fear that it was the most placid period of his painful life; for now, with the exception of the duty he had to perform in the surgery, and which was by no means an onerous one, his whole leisure hours were employed in indulging his passion for reading and translating.  It was during his apprenticeship that he finished the latter portion of the “Aeneid.”

The distance between our residences being so short, I encouraged his inclination to come over, when he could be spared; and in consequence, I saw him about five or six times a month, commonly on Wednesdays and Saturdays, those afternoons being my own most leisure times.  He rarely came empty-handed; either he had a book to read, or brought one with him to be exchanged.  When the weather permitted, we always sat in an arbor at the end of a spacious garden, and, in Boswellian phrase, “we had good talk.”

I cannot at this time remember what was the spark that fired the train of his poetical tendencies,—­I do not remember what was the first signalized poetry he read; but he must have given me unmistakable tokens of his bent of taste; otherwise, at that early stage of his career, I never could have read to him the “Epithalamion” of Spenser; and this I perfectly remember having done, and in that (to me) hallowed old arbor, the scene of many bland and graceful associations,—­all the substances having passed away.  He was at that time, I should suppose, fifteen or sixteen years old; and at that period of life he certainly appreciated the general beauty of the composition, and felt the more passionate passages; for his features and exclamations were ecstatic.  How often have I in after-times heard him quote these lines:—­

“Behold, whiles she before the altar stands, Hearing the holy priest that to her speaks, And blesses her with his two happy hands, How the red roses flush up in her cheeks!  And the pure snow, with goodly vermil stain, Like crimson dyed in grain, That even the angels, which continually About the sacred altar do remain, Forget their service, and about her fly, Oft peeping in her face, that seems more fair, The more they on it stare; But her sad eyes, still fastened on the ground, Are governed with goodly modesty, That suffers not one look to glance awry, Which may let in a little thought unsound.”

That night he took away with him the first volume of the “Faery Queen,” and went through it, as I told his biographer, Mr. Monckton Milnes, “as a young horse would through a spring meadow,—­ramping!” Like a true poet, too,—­a poet “born, not manufactured,”—­a poet in grain,—­he especially singled out the epithets, for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent.  He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said,—­“What an image that is,—­’Sea-shouldering whales’!”