xviii MEMOIR. 
remembers him as a studious boy, preferring a ramble in the fields 
with his collecting-box to cricket and other athletic games. On 
leaving school he was apprenticed to Mr. Alderman Gregory, a 
hosiery manufacturer in Leicester. He had to work thirteen hours 
a day, starting at seven in the morning with sweeping out the 
warehouse. “ Many a time in his earlier apprenticeship days,” says 
his brother Frederick, to whom we are indebted for these glimpses 
of his boyhood, “have I accompanied him to open the warehouse 
and helped him to ‘sweep up’; my reward being the string and 
waste that were on the floors of the warehouse, which were always 
the perquisite of the apprentice.” 
That schoo] life had not, as is the growing modern tendency, 
dulled his desire for knowledge, is evidenced by the employment 
of his scanty leisure. He joined the classes at the Mechanics 
Institute, taking up Greek, Latin, French,* drawing and composition, 
speedily winning prizes in the first two subjects and commendatory 
places in the others. Amongst his papers are preserved a couple 
of essays written for the “General Literary Class at the Leicester 
Mechanics’ Institute” in 1840. One is on the “ Manners, Customs, 
and Religion of the Ancient Britons, from the invasion of Julius 
Cesar to the final subduction (szc) of the island by J. Agricola” ; 
and the other is an “ Essay on Forms of Government.” Both show 
wide reading ; the historical paper containing references not only 
to classical authorities, but to books of travel for purposes of 
comparison between the Celtic peoples and modern barbaric races. 
They are remarkably able productions for a boy of fifteen. Though 
far from strong, inheriting, as did all his brothers, the mother’s 
dyspeptic weakness, he stole hours from sleep to give to study, 
often working till midnight and rising at four, sometimes earlier, 
in the morning, and waking his brother to “hear” his lessons. “ His 
enthusiasm for his work was unbounded ; as witness he had written 
on the fly-leaf of his Latin grammar :— 
“<<T am as fond of Latin 
As women are of satin.’” 
While devoting so much time to class-work, he imbibed in the 
atmosphere of home and of the Institute library that love of reading 
which, to quote his favourite Gibbon, he “ would not exchange for 
the treasures of India.” Apropos of the Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire, his brother records a saying of his that “no one 
* He taught himself German and Portuguese while in the Amazons, 
