The educational system of the school stimulated his ambition to rise in the classes. "By this feeling," he says, "much of my natural antipathy to work, and extreme absence of mind, was conquered in a great measure, and I acquired habits of attention which, however, were very painful to me, and only sustained when I had an object in view." There was an annual speech-day, and Charles, on the first occasion, obtained a prize for his performance. "Every year afterwards," he continues, "I received invariably a prize for speaking, until high enough to carry off the prizes for Latin and English original composition. My inventive talents were not quick, but to have any is so rare a qualification that it is sure to obtain a boy at our great schools (and afterwards as an author) some distinction." Evidently he gave proofs of originality beyond his fellows; since he won a prize for English verse, though he had written in the metre of the "Lady of the Lake" instead of the ordinary ten-syllabic rhyme. On another occasion he commemorated, in his weekly Latin copy, the destruction of the rats in a neighbouring pond, writing in mock heroics, after the style of Homer's battle of the frogs and mice. The school, like all other collections of boys, had its epidemic hobbies. The game of draughts, coupled unfortunately with gambling on a small scale, was followed by chess, and that by music. To each of these Charles was more or less a victim, and his progress up the school was not thereby accelerated. Birds'-nesting also had a turn in its season. His love for natural history made him so keen in this pursuit that he became an expert climber of trees. But his schooldays on the whole were uneventful, and he went to Oxford at a rather early age, his brother Tom having already left Midhurst in order to enter the Navy. FOOTNOTES: [1] Born 1767, died 1849 (also son of a Charles Lyell); educated at St. Andrew's and at St. Peter's College, Cambridge, where he proceeded to the degree of B.A. in 1791 and M.A. in 1794. [2] In 1835, the _Canzoniere_, including the _Vita Nuova and Convito_; a second edition was published in 1842; in 1845 a translation of the Lyrical Poems of Dante. [3] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 3. CHAPTER II. UNDERGRADUATE DAYS.