safely passed; the anxious father pronounced approval with a 'not so bad,' and the young aspirant was pronounced to be fit for the Fourth Form, where, accordingly, he took his place, 4th September, 1824. The superstitious belief that the verses of Virgil, taken by chance, are fraught with prophetic meaning has expired: but a believer in the efficacy of the Sortes Virgilianae might have been confirmed in his creed by the unsuspected appositeness of the verses which chanced to be chosen for the young Etonian's preliminary task. No line that ever Virgil wrote could more aptly embody the main characteristic of Canning's future career — the merging of the duty of punishment in the more congenial process of pacification.
Earl Granville, who had begun a boy's friendship with 'Caro' Canning among the strawberry-beds at Gloucester House, and who was a year or two his junior at Eton, has recorded a grateful remembrance of the protection which Charles Canning extended to him, as a new boy, in the rude experiences of school life, and of his welcome mediation as a pacificator at a fight in the playing fields, which neither combatant was loth to bring to an honourable close. 'His kindness to me,' writes Lord Granville, 'was continuous. His reputation at Eton was high as to ability: the respect and attachment felt for him by his contemporaries the same as has been the case through all his life.'
Charles Canning's Eton career, though marked by
