It was at Eton that he began to feel his wings. His bringing up at home had been scrupulously strict—his literary diet the veriest pap. His precocious brain had been nourished upon food for babes. Not a novel had he been allowed to open, not even Walter Scott’s. Shakespeare he only knew through the medium of his precious brown Bowdler. Now he could travel over all the wide range of the boys’ library, which was then alongside of the entrance to the Provost’s Lodge in Weston’s Yard. I can see him now, sitting perched up Turk-or-tailor-wise in one of the windows looking out on the Yard, with some huge old-world tome almost as big as himself on his lap, the afternoon sun setting on fire the great mop of red hair. There it was that he emancipated himself, making acquaintance with Shakespeare (minus Bowdler), Marlowe, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and the other poets and playwrights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His tendency was greatly towards the drama, especially the Tragic Drama. He had a great sense of humour in others; he worshipped Dickens and would quote him (especially Mrs. Gamp) unwearyingly; but his own genius leaned to Tragedy. It is absurd to pretend, as was said in a letter to the _Times_, that as a boy “he had an extraordinarily wide knowledge of the Greek poets, which he read with ease in the original.” His study of the Greek tragedians, upon whose work he so largely modelled his own, came much later in life. At Eton these were lessons, and lessons are odious; besides no one can assimilate Æschylus in homœopathic doses of thirty lines, and he knew no more Greek than any intelligent boy of his age would do, nor did he take any prominent part in the regular school work, though he was a Prince Consort’s prizeman for modern languages. His first love in literature was given to the English poets, and after or together with these he devoured the great classics of France and Italy. The foundations of his searching knowledge of the French and Italian languages were laid by his accomplished mother. Of German he was ignorant, so Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland were sealed books to him. We may doubt whether they would have appealed to him, for he was essentially a classicist; he might have been better in touch with Schlegel and Novalis, as more nearly akin to the romanticists whom he loved, among whom Victor Hugo was the object of his special reverence; but that which I should call the Gothic in literature might never have existed for aught that he cared. How much he owed to his mother! Lady Jane was an attractive and most distinguished woman. Her conversation was delightful, for her mind was a rich storehouse of all that was good and beautiful, and her rare gift of imparting what she knew was reflected in the bright light of the genius of her son and pupil.