Lord Bute is going on more comfortably than I could have expected. He is on excellent terms with his schoolfellows; and though he prefers "romps" to cricket or gymnastics, yet I am glad to see him making himself happy with the others. More manly tastes will, I think, come in time. His obedience and his desire to please are very pleasing; while his strong religious principles and gentlemanly tone are everything one could desire. His opinions on things in general are rather an inexplicable mixture. I was not surprised to find in him an admiration of the Covenanters and a hatred of Archbishop Sharpe; but I was certainly startled to discover, on the other hand, a liking for the Romish priesthood and ceremonial. I shall, of course, do my best to bring him to sounder views. [Sidenote: 1861, At May Place] We have no evidence as to what methods were employed, or what arguments adduced, by the excellent preceptor in order to carry out the purpose {16} indicated in the concluding lines of his letter. Bute himself never referred to the matter afterwards, but the result was in all probability nugatory. It is not within the recollection of the present writer, who was an inmate of May Place a year or two later, that any serious effort was ever made there to impress religious truths on the minds of the pupils, or indeed to impart to them any definite religious teaching at all. The views and opinions of the young Scot, although only in his fourteenth year, were probably already a great deal more formed on these and kindred subjects than those of his worthy schoolmaster. In any case the time available for detaching his sympathies from the "Romish" priesthood and ritual was short. The boy had come to school very poorly equipped in the matter of general education, as the term was then understood. In the correspondence between his rival guardians, when he was just entering his 'teens, allusion is made to the boy's "precocious intellect," also to the fact that he knew little Latin, no Greek, and (what was considered worse) hardly any French. Mathematics he always cordially disliked; and it is on record that all the counting he did in those early years was invariably on his fingers. His natural intelligence, however, and his aptitude for study soon enabled him to make up for much that had been lost owing to the haphazard and interrupted education of his childhood; and it was not long before he was pronounced intellectually equal to the not very exacting standard of the entrance examination at Harrow. A final reminiscence of his connection with May Place may here be recorded. He revisited his old school not long after his momentous change of creed; and being left alone awhile in {17} the study took up a blank report that lay on the table, and filled it up as follows[6]:-- MONTHLY REPORT OF THE MARQUESS OF BUTE.