“Taking into consideration the peculiar tastes of the person,” says De Quincy, “and the peculiar advantages of the place, I conceive that no pupil of a public school can ever have passed a more luxurious boyhood than Wordsworth. The school discipline was not, I believe, very strict; the mode of living out of school very much resembled that of Eton for Oppidans,--less elegant perhaps, and less costly in its provisions for accommodation, but not less comfortable; and in that part of the arrangement which was chiefly Etonian, even more so; for in both places the boys, instead of being gathered into one fold, and at night into one or two huge dormitories, were distributed amongst motherly old “dames,” technically so called at Eton, but not at Hawkshead.” In the latter place, agreeably to the inferior scale of the whole establishment, the houses were smaller and more college like, consequently more like private households; and the old lady of the _menage_ was more constantly amongst them, providing with maternal tenderness, and with a professional pride, for the comfort of her young flock, and protecting the weak from oppression. The humble cares to which those poor matrons dedicated themselves, may be collected from several allusions scattered through the poems of Wordsworth; that entitled “Nutting” for instance, in which his early Spinosistic feeling is introduced of a mysterious power diffused through the solitudes of woods, a presence that was disturbed by the intrusion of careless and noisy outrage, and which is brought into a strong relief by the previous homely picture of the old housewife equipping her young charge with beggar’s weeds in order to prepare him for a struggle with thorns and brambles. Indeed not only the moderate rank of the boys, and the peculiar kind of relation assumed by these matrons, equally suggested this humble class of motherly attentions, but the whole spirit of the place and neighbourhood was favourable to an old English homeliness of domestic and personal economy.” It will thus be seen that Wordsworth was early inducted into those thriftful and economical habits which marked his character through life, and enabled him during his young days to bear the temporary loss of his paternal fortune without much inconvenience. And the above facts are worthy to be remembered, not only as illustrating much for us in the history of Wordsworth, but as another instance of the power of a wise and early training. The poet thus alludes to the cottages of the “Danes:”--