German, astronomy, geology, chemistry and the like; but all such useful educationals were quite ignored by the clerical boobies who then professed to teach young gentlemen all that they needed to know.  Sixty years ago I perceived what we all see now (teste Lord Sherborne) that a most imperfect classical education, such as was then provided for us, was the least useful introduction to the real business of life, except that it was fashionable, and gave a man some false prestige in the circle of society.  At about sixteen I left Charterhouse for a private tutor, Dr. Stocker, then head of Elizabeth College, Guernsey, seeing my father wished to do him a service for kindly private reasons; I was not at the College, but a pupil in his own house:  however, as this other Rev. D.D. proved a failure, I was passed on to a Rev. Mr. Twopeny of Long Wittenham, near Dorchester, staying with him about a year with like little profit; when I changed to Mr. Holt’s at Albury, a most worthy friend and neighbour, with whom I read diligently until my matriculation at Oxford, when I was about nineteen.  With Holt, my intimate comrade was Harold Browne, the present Bishop of Winchester, and he will remember that it was our rather mischievous object to get beyond Mr. Holt in our prepared Aristotle and Plato, as we knew he had hard work to keep even in the race with his advanced pupils by dint of midnight oil.  With this good tutor and the excellent ministrations of Hugh M’Neile, the famous rector of Albury, my status pupillaris comes technically to an end, Oxford being practically independence; albeit I am sure that education can cease only with human life, even if it be not carried further, onward and upward, through the cycles of eternity.

As I did not care to stop the continuity of this gossiping record (perhaps too light and too frank, but it is best unaltered) I must now hark back for a few years, to fill in whatever small details of early life and primitive literature happened to me, between school and college.  Truly, much of this amounts to recording trivialities; but boyhood, not to say life also, is made up of trifles; and there is always interest to a reader in personal anecdotes and experiences, the more if they are lively rather than severe.  Let this excuse that lengthy account of “My Schooldays.”

CHAPTER III.

YOUNG AUTHORSHIP IN VERSE AND PROSE.

Of my earliest MS., written soon after my seventh birthday, I have no copy, and only a very confused memory:  but I remember that my good mother treasured for years and showed to many friends something in the nature of an elegy which a broken-hearted little brother wrote on the death of an infant sister from his first school:  this is only mentioned in case any one of my older readers may possibly supply such a lost MS. in a child’s roundhand.  At school, chiefly as a young Carthusian, I frequently broke out into verse, where prose translation was more properly