He smiled, patted me on the head, and said the hours and discipline could not be changed, merely to suit the fantastic taste of one boy. I knew this well enough already; in fact, I was not so absurd as to suppose that a public school could be maintained on my visionary principles, or that any rules could be established for their government but such as took account of average abilities, and made allowance for an ordinary share of feeling and patience. Whether or not my quantum of sensibility were needlessly great, is of little consequence: it certainly was so different from that of my companions, that it completely prevented my profiting, in the mean time, by the opportunities of this school, and drove me to rest my only prospect of happiness in getting away from its thraldom. Certain very troublesome misgivings, also, as to the future, came across my juvenile thoughts about this epoch; especially as to the probabilities of happiness in that wide world of freedom for which my soul panted, and of which I knew nothing, except by description. I happened, one day, to get hold of Gray’s Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College,—a poem fraught, it is true, with images of the highest possible beauty, both of thought and of expression, but most of which are certainly far better calculated to beget despondency than hope, by teaching that school days are unavoidably happier than those of after-life. What the ‘march of intellect’ may have done lately to remedy this matter, I cannot say; but in my time, and at the particular school alluded to, the season of boyhood was, to me at least, any thing but a happy one; and I well remember, after reading the poem in question, exclaiming, in a state of great despair, “If it is certain that my future life is to be more wretched than this, which is now so full of misery, what, alas! is existence worth?”