Xlll 



tion ; even his scholarship, probably far more extensive, wanted 

 that exquisite polish and nicety acquired only at our great public 

 schools, from which came his chief rivals. He carried away, how- 

 ever, the Craven Scholarship, two prizes for English verse, and 

 finally, the object of his highest ambition, a Fellowship of Trinity 

 College. On this success he dwelt to the close of his life with pride. 

 It gratified two of his strongest feelings, attachment to Cambridge, 

 and the desire of some independent provision which should enable 

 him to enter on his professional career. On the inestimable advan- 

 tages of such fellowships to young men of high promise and ability 

 but of scanty means, he always insisted with great earnestness, and 

 deprecated any change in the academical system which should dimi- 

 nish the number of such foundations, held, as he would recount with 

 his unfailing memory, by so many of our first public men. 



The Law was the profession he chose ; he was called to the Bar at 

 Lincoln's Inn, February 1826; he took chambers, he read, he joined 

 the Northern Circuit. But literature was too strong for law. His 



legal studies were no doubt of infinite value ; they were in truth in- 



o 



dispensable for his historical writings, and were hereafter to bear 

 fruit in a sphere which his wildest imagination could not anticipate. 

 He had received, indeed, from the discerning judgment of Lord 

 Lyndhurst, a Commissionership of Bankrupts, 1827. No doubt his 

 Cambridge fame and general promise recommended him for that office. 

 But it was to letters that he was to owe his first opening to public 

 life. In letters he had begun with modest contributions to a maga- 

 zine, Knight's Quarterly, of no great circulation, but which was 

 mainly supported by some of his Cambridge friends : in this ap- 

 peared some of his finest ballads. On a sudden he broke out with 

 an article on Milton in the Edinburgh Review, which perhaps 

 excited greater attention than any article which had ever appeared, 

 not immediately connected with the politics of the day. Taking the 

 field in the same pages with the brilliant copiousness of Jeffrey, the 

 vigorous and caustic versatility of Brougham, the inimitable wit and 

 drollery and sound sense of Sydney Smith, to say nothing of the 

 writers in the rival Quarterly Journal, the young reviewer had struck 

 out his own path. In comprehensiveness of knowledge, in the ori- 

 ginality and boldness of his views, in mastery over the whole history 

 and the life of the eventful times of Milton, in variety and felicity of 



