Dr. Birkbeck Hill was, in a special sense, a man who won the affection of his pupils. He came to us from Oxford, where he had been the friend of Morris and Swinburne, and I remember the first time that I saw one of those newly designed wallpapers, which were destined afterwards to play so important a part in the movement initiated by Rossetti and Morris, was in the dining-room of Bruce Castle School. Dr. Birkbeck Hill was a man of considerable literary taste and literary power. He was contributing at that time, though it was not generally known, some brilliant light articles to the _Saturday Review_ under the editorship of Mr. Harwood, and he very soon attached himself to that devoted study of Dr. Johnson which finally provided the theme for some admirable work in criticism and biography. It is possible that he may have perceived in me some inclination towards letters, for he often used to show me his articles in the current number of the _Review_, and very soon by his own enthusiasm he awakened in me an interest in his hero Johnson, which has never since abated. A copy of Boswell’s _Life_, which he afterwards gave me on the occasion of my marriage, still stands in its ten little volumes as one of the books within reach of my bed. They share the honours of my book-shelf with the novels of Charles Dickens, and for me there are no two authors to whom I can so constantly return with ever-renewed enjoyment when sleep is not easy to win. But there was an older master, Mr. Braid, who exercised an even more powerful influence in forming and directing my taste. His special subject in the curriculum of the school was mathematics, but he was an ardent lover of literature and a devoted student of Shakespeare. He did not live in the school, but many times after school hours he used to take me down to his modest rooms in the village and show me some of the books in his small but well-loved library. Impelled by his enthusiasm I had read, before I left school, the whole of Shakespeare, as well as _Paradise Lost_ and the shorter poems of Milton; and it was by his encouragement that I made my first attempt in writing, in the sufficiently ambitious experiment of an essay on _King Lear_. I have lost the essay, and the world has lost it, a fact not to be deeply deplored by either. But this crude experiment set me on my way, and when I quitted school at the age of sixteen my ambition was already aflame to try and do something in the world of letters. But, curiously enough, the aptitude which I had shown at school was towards mathematics, and here my work had so far impressed the examiners, one of whom was Charles Faulkner, afterwards so closely associated with Rossetti and Burne-Jones, that Dr. Hill endeavoured to persuade my father to send me to Cambridge.