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ferior intellectual calibre, yet he had a much livelier sympathy with the inherited capacity of a governing class than with the qualities which make men successful party politicians; and while in the best sense of the word liberal in his views, he was much more interested in imperial questions, and in those affecting human culture, than in the political struggles of these later days. He was born at New York in 1826, and brought almost immediately afterwards to England. He passed two or three years of his childhood in the West Indies; and his earliest recollections of the awakening of mental interests and of a taste for reading were connected with that time. After returning to England and going to one or two preparatory schools, he went to Harrow in 1839, which he entered in the lowest form, and left at the head of the school in 1844. He must have worked hard there, as he gained all the great prizes of the school for verse and prose composition; but according to his own account, all his natural tastes were for outdoor sports and games; and it was only by an effort of will, and (it may be added) under the influence of that ambition which, as he tells the students in his last address, is "in youth almost identical with virtue," that he kept steadily to his work. He was probably kept up to it also by the influence of his most intimate school friend, Percy Smythe, the last Lord Strangford, whose whole life, from boyhood till his early death, was one of unceasing mental activity. Though Grant left Harrow a well-developed scholar on all sides, his chief distinction was gained in Latin verse, – an accomplishment which in many cases has had a special attraction for those who in later life have gained honour in action, as it has had for others who have become classical writers of English prose and verse. He gained distinction also in games, and especially in the great game in which the chief renown of Harrow has been won; and for two successive seasons he played at Lords in the matches against Eton and Winchester. In November of 1844 he was elected to one of the two open Balliol scholarships, the other being gained by one whose great knowledge and intellectual brilliancy are still fresh in the memory of Oxford men, H. J. Smith, the late Savilian Professor of Geometry. The third in the competition was the present Judge Advocate-General. He came into residence in the spring of 1845, and at once became popular with all sets in college – reading men and idle men, fast men and steady men, men of High Church and men of Broad Church tendencies, the last of which were just at that time beginning to assert themselves. But while no man enjoyed the amusements and social life of the place with more zest, his main interest even as an undergraduate was intellectual self-improvement. He was especially fond of the literature which treats speculative questions of human interest with a union of thought and imagination: and among his favourite prose authors were Coleridge, Carlyle, Emerson, and later, in his Oxford time, Goethe; and among English poets, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Tennyson. He read his Latin and Greek authors, to enjoy them and to imbibe their spirit, not to gain marks in examinations; and the result of this mode of reading was, that he was placed only in the second class in the final examination for his degree – a class in which, about that period, other men appear whose