In the last passage the writer did himself some injustice, and what he seems to have taken for “incorrigible idleness,” was in reality nothing else than the demand of nature within him for some real rest and relaxation from his Oxford studies. His scrupulous conscientiousness, moreover, was already beginning to cause him much anxiety with regard to his future life, as the time for his leaving Oxford was approaching. That warning voice of nature, however, unhappily was not attended to. He would have entered the Schools for his final examination the succeeding autumn, or at latest the following spring; but in the latter part of the summer of this year (1864), under the strain of overwork, his health broke completely down, and for a period of some years he was obliged to live in a state of enforced, and to him scarcely endurable, inactivity. A great portion of this time he spent in the retired parts of Wales, and the English Lake District, and some part of it in Ireland. On one occasion, during this period, writing to one of his brothers on his experiences of overwork, he says:-- “Let me advise you earnestly not to try _to do too many things_. I killed the goose with a vengeance, and got no golden egg. I was expecting in a few weeks [when taken ill] a degree with honours, and a good start in life, and ... had to leave Oxford without even an ordinary degree, which I knew more than enough to have taken the Easter before, if it would have satisfied me. I should have been surprised to have been told that season, when I was riding H----’s little cob in Rotten Row, in the glory of summer and all the hope of youth, that before the leaves had all left the trees that very horse would have been H----’s death, and that I should be a hundred times worse than dead.”[2]