At Mr Fletcher’s school young Graham failed to make the progress in classics which his friends expected from him. The previous training afforded to him at Netherby may perhaps account for this circumstance. At ten years of age he was already an expert angler and a good shot, accomplishments not to be despised in their proper place, but scarcely conducive to rapid advancement in the path of early scholarship. Hence, when removed to Westminster in 1806, he cut but an indifferent figure at entrance, and, though not idle, never managed afterwards to take a foremost place among his contemporaries. It is fair to add that the place which he did take was always a respectable one. He quite held his own against the late Duke of Richmond, then Lord Charles Lennox, to whom he was fag, and suffered nothing in comparison with the present Earl Russell, the occupant with him of the same form. Westminster boys have always enjoyed the privilege of admission to the debates in the House of Commons; and among them all, between the years 1806 and 1809, none took more frequent advantage of it than young Graham. He came just in time to listen to some of the last speeches of Pitt and Fox, and to be stirred by the scarcely less exciting harangues of Windham, Grattan, Sheridan, and Canning. These, with Wilberforce’s persuasive appeals against slavery, and Romilly’s stern denunciations of the cruelty of the penal code, took a strong hold of his imagination. He yearned for the time when he, in like manner, might be able to carry the House along with him, and already determined that nothing should on his part be wanting to bring about the accomplishment of the dream. It was the memory of what he had himself felt on such occasions, which induced him, at one of the meetings of the old Westminsters, to argue as he did, with great force, against the project for removing the school into the country. No considerations of physical health ought, in his opinion, to be weighed against the abandonment of an intellectual impulse so powerful as was supplied to the boys by their proximity to the Houses of Parliament; and believing, as we do, that the sanitary drawbacks to Westminster where it now stands are grossly exaggerated, we believe also that Sir James Graham took a wise and even a benevolent view of the matter then under discussion. In 1809 young Graham quitted Westminster, and became a private pupil in the family of the Rev. G. Richards, Vicar of Bampton, near Farringdon, in Berkshire. There he made the acquaintance of Sir John Throckmorton, one of the most eminent agriculturists of the day, and learned from him how much was to be gained by the application of science and capital to the culture of the soil. His sojourn in Bampton did not, however, extend beyond a year. In 1810 he entered as a gentleman-commoner at Christ Church, and in 1812 quitted Oxford without having at all distinguished himself there, or even passed for a degree.