’The scholarship was decided last night; Smith, a Rugby man, got the first, and Grant, a Harrow man, the second....  I saw the Master afterwards; he said, “I cannot congratulate you on success, Mr. Patteson, but you have done yourself great credit, and passed a very respectable examination.  I shall be happy to allow you to enter without a future examination, as we are all quite satisfied of your competency.”  He said that I had better come up to matriculate next term, but should not have another examination.  We were in about nine hours a day, three hours in the evening; I thought the papers very hard; we had no Latin elegiacs or lyrics, which was rather a bore for the Eton lot.  I am very glad I have been up now, but I confess it was the longest week I ever recollect.  I feel quite seedy after a whole week without exercise....  The very first paper, the Latin Essay (for which we were in six hours), was the worst of all my papers, and must have given the examiners an unfavourable impression to start with.  The rest of my papers, with the exception of the Greek prose and the critical paper, I did very fairly, I think.’

A greater disappointment than this was, however, in store for Coley.  He failed in attaining a place among the ‘select,’ at his last examination for the Newcastle, in the spring of 1845.  Before the list was given out he had written to his father that the Divinity papers were far too easy, with no opportunity for a pretty good scholar to show his knowledge, ’the ridicule of every one of the masters,’ but the other papers very difficult.

‘Altogether,’ he adds, ’the scholarship has been to me unsatis-factory.  I had worked hard at Greek prose, had translated and re-translated a good deal of Xenophon, Plato, and some Demosthenes, yet to my disappointment we had no paper of Greek prose, a thing that I believe never occurred before, and which is generally believed to test a boy’s knowledge well.  My Iambics were good, I expect, though not without two bad faults.  In fact, I cannot look back upon a single paper, except my Latin prose, without a multitude of oversights and faults presenting themselves to me...  I almost dread the giving out of the select.  Think if my name was not there.  It is some consolation that Hawtrey, yesterday, in giving me an exercise for good, asked how I liked the examination.  Upon my saying, “It was not such a one as I expected, and that I had done badly,” he said “That is not at all what I hear,” but this cannot go for much...  I want exercise very badly, and my head is very thick and stupid, as I fear this last paper must show the examiners.’

The omission of Patteson’s name from among the select was a great mortification, not only to himself but his father, though the Judge kindly wrote:—­