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 [Greek: nephelegerheta Zehys] 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[11] glory of England. To box, and to box under the severest restraint of honorable laws, was in those days a mere necessity of school-boy life at _public_ schools; and hence the superior manliness, generosity, and self-control, of those generally who benefited by such discipline--so systematically hostile to all meanness, pusillanimity, or indirectness. Cowper, in his poem on that subject, is far from doing justice to our great public schools. Himself disqualified, by 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.