Already, like one of those his biting pen had satirised, he too, it must be owned, teems with “confidence in the nation--and himself.” There was a daredevilry about him, and in those days a romantic melancholy, akin to that of the Spanish artist Goya. Far behind have faded those consuming pangs of boyish restlessness, when fevered imagination played vaguely on inexperience. Far behind, those schools of “words” which never slaked his thirst for ideas, and where he ran wild as rebel ringleader.[13] Far away now, those boxing bouts witnessed by Layard’s mother. Past, that earliest and unpublished novel of _Aylmer Papillon_,[14] which Murray praised but would not print. Past, that fugitive satire of the “New Dunciad,” which does not deserve to remain waste-paper.[15] Past, that abortive journal, which in transforming an old periodical while adopting its name was to have revolutionised opinion.[16] Vanished, too, those first outbursts of unchastened brilliance under the favouring auspices of the Layards’ fair kinswoman, Mrs. Austin. And the vista of his two long journeys have receded; the alternate spells of Venice, the Rhine and Rome, and afterwards of Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem. Past, also, the strange malady for which his Eastern travels proved the stranger cure. As he muses, the ball is at his feet. Yet, when the daydream fades, is he, perhaps, after all, only Alnaschar of the broken glass, bemoaning vain reveries amid the ruined litter of his overturned basket in the jeering market-place? The seed-time of reflection is over: he pants for action. No more for him the beaten tracks. Hitherto he had fed on books and dreams. The former had led him to a pondered plan, with Bolingbroke for clue and Pitt as example. The latter fired his ambition--his presumption--to realise them by restoring vanished life to a now mouldering party--by suiting old forms to new phases and heading them. Next morning the secluded scholar, so friendly a contrast with his daring son, is bound for Oxford to receive his long delayed honours. This very day that son’s earliest election-procession starts from the doorway of the tranquil manor house.[17] Already the budding genius has descried the dim future of his country, which he has proclaimed must be governed for and through the nation; of which, too, he has already sung in halting verse:-- “... ceased the voice Of Great Britannia; vanished as it ceased Her glance imperial.”