[Footnote 28: His letters to Mr. Sinclair, in return, are unluckily lost,--one of them, as this gentleman tells me, having been highly characteristic of the jealous sensitiveness of his noble schoolfellow, being written under the impression of some ideal slight, and beginning, angrily, "Sir."] [Footnote 29: On a leaf of one of his note-books, dated 1808, I find the following passage from Marmontel, which no doubt struck him as applicable to the enthusiasm of his own youthful friendships:--"L'amitié, qui dans le monde est à peine un sentiment, est une passion dans les cloîtres."--_Contes Moraux_.] [Footnote 30: Mr. D'Israeli, in his ingenious work "On the Literary Character," has given it as his opinion, that a disinclination to athletic sports and exercises will be, in general, found among the peculiarities which mark a youthful genius. In support of this notion he quotes Beattie, who thus describes his ideal minstrel:-- "Concourse, and noise, and toil, he ever fled, Nor cared to mingle in the clamorous fray Of squabbling imps, but to the forest sped." His highest authority, however, is Milton, who says of himself, "When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing." Such general rules, however, are as little applicable to the dispositions of men of genius as to their powers. If, in the instances which Mr. D'Israeli adduces an indisposition to bodily exertion was manifested, as many others may be cited in which the directly opposite propensity was remarkable. In war, the most turbulent of exercises, Æschylus, Dante, Camoens, and a long list of other poets, distinguished themselves; and, though it may be granted that Horace was a bad rider, and Virgil no tennis-player, yet, on the other hand, Dante was, we know, a falconer as well as swordsman; Tasso, expert both as swordsman and dancer; Alfieri, a great rider; Klopstock, a skaiter; Cowper, famous, in his youth, at cricket and foot-ball; and Lord Byron, pre-eminent in all sorts of exercises.] [Footnote 31: "At eight or nine years of age the boy goes to school. From that moment he becomes a stranger in his father's house. The course of parental kindness is interrupted. The smiles of his mother, those tender admonitions, and the solicitous care of both his parents, are no longer before his eyes--year after year he feels himself more detached from them, till at last he is so effectually weaned from the connection, as to find himself happier anywhere than in their company."--_Cowper, Letters._] [Footnote 32: Even previously to any of these school friendships, he had formed the same sort of romantic attachment to a boy of his own age, the son of one of his tenants at Newstead; and there are two or three of his most juvenile poems, in which he dwells no less upon the inequality than the warmth of this friendship. Thus:--