Both boys had the benefit of the best schooling of the time.

They were sent as boarders to the Portora School at Enniskillen, one of the four Royal schools of Ireland.

Oscar went to Portora in 1864 at the age of nine, a couple of years after his brother.

He remained at the school for seven years and left it on winning an Exhibition for Trinity College, Dublin, when he was just seventeen.
The facts hitherto collected and published about Oscar as a schoolboy are sadly meagre and insignificant.

Fortunately for my readers I have received from Sir Edward Sullivan, who was a contemporary of Oscar both at school and college, an exceedingly vivid and interesting pen-picture of the lad, one of those astounding masterpieces of portraiture only to be produced by the plastic sympathies of boyhood and the intimate intercourse of years lived in common.