At school the brothers seem to have kept much to themselves; they took little interest in the school sports, in which their great size and strength would have well qualified them to excel, and passed their time chiefly in reading and wandering over the rolling wold and flat shores of their native Lincolnshire. They began at an early age their apprenticeship to poetry. Alfred, at least, had written a considerable volume of verse by the time he was fourteen, and all three contributed to the _Poems by Two Brothers_, which were published at Louth in 1827, when Frederick, the author of four of the poems, had just entered St. John's, Cambridge (his father's old College). Charles used to tell how, when the tiny volume was published, he and Alfred hired a conveyance out of the £10 which the publisher had given them, and drove off for the day to their favourite Mablethorpe, where they shouted themselves hoarse on the shore as they rolled out poem by poem in one another's ears. The notes and headings to the poems give some idea of the breadth and variety of reading for which the brothers had found opportunity in their quiet country life, for the volume contains twenty quotations from Horace, eight from Virgil, six from Byron, five from Isaiah, four from Ossian, three from Cicero, two apiece from Moore, Xenophon, Milton, Claudian, and the Book of Jeremiah, with others from Addison, John Clare, Juvenal, Ulloa's _Voyages_, Beattie, Rennel's _Herodotus_, Savary's _Letters_, Tacitus' _Annals_, Pliny, Suetonius' _Lives of the Caesars_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, Racine, the _Mysteries of Udolpho_, _La Auruncana_, the _Songs of Jayadeva_, Sir William Jones (_History of Nadir Shah_, _Eastern Plants_, and _Works_, vol. vi.), Cowper, Ovid, _Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful_, Dr. Langhorne's _Collins_, Mason's _Caractacus_, Rollin, Contino's _Epitaph on Camoens_, Hume, Scott, the Books of Joel and Judges, Berquin, Young, Sale's Koran, Apollonius of Rhodes, Disraeli's _Curiosities of Literature_, Sallust, Terence, Lucretius, Coxe's _Switzerland_, Rousseau, the _Ranz des Vaches_, _Baker on Animalculae_, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman and various old English ballads, while many notes give odd scraps of scientific, geographical, and historical learning.