"Spedding was the Pope among us young men--the wisest man I know."--_Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son_, p. 32. James Spedding, of whom FitzGerald wrote, "He was the wisest man I have known," was born June 20, 1808, at Mirehouse, Keswick, and was the third son of John Spedding. He was educated at the Grammar School, Bury St. Edmunds, where his father, leaving his Cumberland home, went to live for the purpose of putting his sons under the care of Dr. Malkin. Among his school-fellows were W. B. Donne, J. M. Kemble (the Anglo-Saxon scholar), the three brothers FitzGerald, and his own brother Edward, who with himself was at the head of the school when they left. From Bury he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he was contemporary with Frederick, Charles, and Alfred Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), and W. H. Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity), and was very early admitted into the fellowship of the Apostles. On Commemoration Day, 1830, he was called upon to deliver an oration in the College Chapel, the subject being "An Apology for the Moral and Literary Character of the Nineteenth Century," which was afterwards printed. Another of his early productions was a speech against Political Unions, written for a debating society in the University of Cambridge, which, although anonymous, attracted the notice of the author of _Philip van Artevelde_, afterwards his colleague in the Colonial Office, who quoted some passages from it in the notes to his poem, with the remark: "It is a singular trait of the times that a speech containing so much of sagacity and mature reflection as is to be found in this exercitation, should have been delivered in an academical debating club, and should have passed away in a pamphlet, which, as far as I am aware, attracted no notice. Time and place consenting, a brilliant Parliamentary reputation might be built upon a tithe of the merit." In 1831 he won the Members' Prize with a Latin essay on "Utrum boni plus an mali hominibus et civitatibus attulerit dicendi copia," and in 1832 he was again a candidate, and wrote to Thompson on the 4th of May about it: