He joined in their pranks, and contributed to their amusement with his ready good-humour and unflagging drollery.
Mr.Dale told him there was plenty of time before October, and no fear about his passing, if he worked hard.

He found the work easy, except epigram-writing, which he thought "excessively stupid and laborious," but helped himself out, when scholarship failed, with native wit.

Some of his exercises remain, not very brilliant Latinity; some he saucily evaded, thus: "Subject: _Non sapere maximum est malum._ "Non sapere est grave; sed, cum dura epigrammata oportet Scribere, tunc sentis praecipue esse malum." In Switzerland and Italy, during the autumn of 1835, he had made a great many drawings, carefully outlined in pencil or pen on gray paper, and sparsely touched with body colour, in direct imitation of the Prout lithographs.

Prout's original coloured sketches he had seen, no doubt, in the exhibition; but he does not seem to have thought of imitating them, for his work in this kind was all intended to be for illustration and not for framing.

The "Italy" vignettes likewise, with all their inspiration, suggested to him only pen-etching; he was hardly conscious that somewhere there existed the tiny, coloured pictures that Turner had made for the engraver.