Some time before his cousin's letter arrived, he had been taken with a craze for English poetry, and, but for the corrective influence of a favorite tutor would probably have thrown himself into it with the same exclusive passion as he had shown for subject after subject in his eager a ebullient childhood.

His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the subject, of 'The Faerie Queene' to a school-friend, in which, with a sincerity which made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked-- 'I can truly say with Pope, that this great work has afforded me extraordinary pleasure.' And about the same time, a master who was much interested in the boy's prospects of getting the school prize for Latin verse, a subject for which he had always shown a special aptitude, asked him anxiously, after an Easter holiday, what he had been reading; the boy ran his hands through his hair, and still keeping his finger between the leaves, shut a book before him from which he had been learning by heart, and which was, alas! neither Ovid nor Virgil.
'I have just finished Belial! 'he said, with a sigh of satisfaction, 'and am beginning Beelzebub.' A craze of this kind was naturally followed by a feverish period of juvenile authorship, when the house was littered over with stanzas from the opening canto of a great poem on Columbus, or with moral essays in the manner of Pope, castigating the vices of the time with an energy which sorely tried the gravity of the mother whenever she was called upon, as she invariably was, to play audience to the young poet.

At the same time the classics absorbed in reality their full share of this fast developing power.

Virgil and Aeschylus appealed to the same fibres, the same susceptibilities, as Milton and Shakspeare, and, the boy's quick imaginative sense appropriated Greek and Latin life with the same ease which it showed in possessing itself of that bygone English life whence sprung the 'Canterbury Tales,' or 'As You Like It.' So that his tutor, who was much attached to him, and who made it one of his main objects in life to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical _minutiae_, began about the time of Sir Mowbray's letter to prophesy very smooth things indeed to his mother as to his future success at college, the possibility of his getting the famous St.Anselm's scholarship, and so on.
Evidently such a youth, was not likely to depend for the attainment of a foothold in life on a piece of family privileges.

The world was all before him where to choose, Mrs.Elsmere thought proudly to herself, as her mother's fancy wandered rashly through the coming years.