Our candidate and his old schoolfellow, Henry Dart, of Exeter College, set to work on the next subject, "The Exile of St.
Helena," and after the long vacation read their work to each other, accepting the hints and corrections of a friendly rivalry.
Meantime his old nurse Anne (it is trivial, but a touch of nature), being at Oxford in attendance on the ladies, and keen, as she always was, for Master John's success, heard from the keeper of the Reading-room of criticisms on his published verses.

She brought the news to his delighted mother.

"He was pleased," she writes, "but says that he forms his own estimate of his poems, and reviews don't alter it; but 'How my father will be delighted! How he will crow!'" Which historiette repeated itself many a time in the family annals.
In Lent term, 1838, he was hard at work on the new poem.

He wrote: "I must give an immense time every day to the Newdigate, which I must have, if study will get it.

I have much to revise.