He languished, indeed, for weeks upon a sofa; and, during that interval, it happened naturally, from my repose of manners, that I was a privileged visitor to him throughout his waking hours. I was also present at his bedside in the closing hour of his life, which exhaled quietly, amidst snatches of delirious conversation with some imaginary visitors. My brother was a stranger from causes quite as little to be foreseen, but seeming quite as natural after they had really occurred. In an early stage of his career, he had been found wholly unmanageable. His genius for mischief amounted to inspiration; it was a divine _afflatus_ which drove him in that direction; and such was his capacity for riding in whirlwinds and directing storms, that he made it his trade to create them, as a _nephelaegereta Zeus_, a cloud-compelling Jove, in order that he _might_ direct them. For this, and other reasons, he had been sent to the Grammar School of Louth, in Lincolnshire--one of those many old classic institutions which form the peculiar [1] glory of England. To box, and to box under the severest restraint of honorable laws, was in those days a mere necessity of schoolboy life at _public_ schools; and hence the superior manliness, generosity, and self-control of those generally who had benefited by such discipline--so systematically hostile to all meanness, pusillanimity, or indirectness. Cowper, in his "Tyrocinium," is far from doing justice to our great public schools. Himself disqualified, by a delicacy of temperament, for reaping the benefits from such a warfare, and having suffered too much in his own Westminster experience, he could not judge them from an impartial station; but I, though ill enough adapted to an atmosphere so stormy, yet having tried both classes of schools, public and private, am compelled in mere conscience to give my vote (and, if I had a thousand votes, to give _all_ my votes) for the former.