He had taken to exercise his brains prematurely, not only in learning, but also in reflection; and a reflectiveness that is indulged before we have a rigid mastery of the emotions, or have slain them, is apt to make a young man more than commonly a child of nerves: nearly as much so as the dissipated, with the difference that they are hilarious while wasting their treasury, which he is not; and he may recover under favouring conditions, which is a point of vantage denied to them.

Physically he had stout reserves, for he had not disgraced the temple.

His intemperateness lay in the craving to rise and lead: a precocious ambition.

This apparently modest young man started with an aim--and if in the distance and with but a slingstone, like the slender shepherd fronting the Philistine, all his energies were in his aim--at Government.

He had hung on the fringe of an Administration.