SIR CHARLES LYELL. 593 



" we bad the very best boys in Wilts, Dorset, and Hants " a touch 

 of a sort that dies out of his letters or journals with the course of 

 time), and finally at Midhurst, in the very heart of the Weald of Sus- 

 sex. He was thus spared the brutal influence of " compulsory foot- 

 ball," which would have been substituted for the pursuit of nature in 

 a modern public school. His tutors, indeed, shook their heads at his 

 solitary ways, but they only gently hinted that they were unmanly. 

 Our enlightened modern head masters would have severely repri- 

 manded him for "loafing." 



On the other hand, the boy's school-training laid the foundation 

 for that wide and general culture which was afterward so markedly to 

 distinguish him, even among the cultivated scientific men of his own 

 time. The danger of becoming a narrow specialist, with no eye for 

 anything on earth except the last rare thing in ammonites, was ob- 

 viated in great part by the direction given to his natural tastes at Mid- 

 hurst. He "had a livelier sense than most of the boys of the beauty 

 of English poetry," he tells his wife, long after. " Milton, Thomson, 

 and Gray were my favorites, and even Virgil and Ovid gave me some 

 real pleasure, and I knew the most poetic passages in them." Scott 

 dazzled his boyish fancy as he dazzled all the world while the present 

 century was in its teens ; and when a school competition was proposed 

 for the best English verse in the ordinary heroic decasyllabic couplets, 

 Lyell Senior boldly sent in his copy in the metre of the " Lady of the 

 Lake," and won the prize, too, in spite of innovation attempted and 

 rules openly infringed. Some burlesque Latin hexameters which he 

 wrote about the same time lingered in his memory till past middle 

 life an epic siiggested by the Batrachomyomachia, and devoted to 

 the draining of the play-ground pond, much infested by predaceous 

 water-rats. Such things are small in themselves, no doubt ; every 

 promising lad of literary tendencies at every big school has done the 

 very same in his time, without setting the Thames on fire, after all ; 

 but they are valuable as marking the specific admixture which made 

 Lyell something other in after-life than the mere bone-hunter or snail- 

 catcher of scientific societies. Heaven forbid that our future geolo- 

 gists should all be cast in the uniform mold of the classical tripos ! 

 but there was a certain tinge of the humane letters about these savants 

 of the last generation which relieved them from the chilliness, the 

 austerity, and the want of human interest that many people notice as 

 a defect among the average scientific men of the present day. 



At seventeen young even for those days, I fancy Lyell went up 

 to Oxford. His college, Exeter, was still almost exclusively a west- 

 country one, and west-countrymen were not popular nor remarkable 

 in the university for polished manners. He tells his father a mythical 

 story how some Devonshire man at Exeter was asked by the examin- 

 ers, "Who was Moses?" "Moses," says the examinee, "I knows 

 nothing about Moses ; but ax me about St. Paul, and there I has 'ee." 

 vol. xx. 38 



