quality, "though most peaceably inclined, and seeming even to give up his just rights, rather than to dispute with any man, yet, paradox as it may seem, loves fighting for fighting's sake, and delights in bruising; he has but barely recovered his eye-sight, and yet I have much ado to keep him from trying again the chance of war; and yet he and his antagonist are the best friends in the world, learn together, assist each other, and I believe, love each other better than any two boys in the school." It would not be difficult, indeed, to trace this unyielding spirit through different changes of his being, under the guidance of christian discipline, till it reached its maturity in the moral courage which enabled him to contend patiently and manfully for the truth, in defiance of a virulent opposition which ceased not even with his life; but it may suffice to say here, that in every stage of the progress it was entirely exempt from all malice and ill will, that no man living was ever less disposed to give a provocation, or more prone to overlook one, and that as far as the physical part of the quality was concerned, the only remnant of it, even in his youth, was a calm fortitude which inspired respect, and a desirable presence of mind, in all the difficulties and emergencies of life.
Of his taste for humour, however, which has been truly said to be almost always allied to genius, something more deserves to be said. Mr. Graves, who must be considered as no mean judge of these matters, thus speaks of the dawn of this quality in his pupil's mind: "He has finished Horace, and has read five satires in Juvenal with apparent taste, and I never saw a boy of his age enter more instantaneously into the humour of the fifth satire, which describes so feelingly the affronts and mortifications which a parasite meets with at a great man's table."
"I never saw a boy shew a quicker sense of
