66 EARLY LIFE. 



in October; and I recollect, after passing through 

 Carlisle, breakfasting at Netherby, where we saw Sir 

 James Graham, then a child, in his nurse's arms. 

 The Bishop of Carlisle (Vernon, afterwards Archbishop 

 of York) and I have often talked of the change which 

 forty or fifty years had made on that infant. 



Under Playfair I then began the course of mathe- 

 matics. Nothing could be more admirable than his 

 teaching. He was at all times accessible to his pupils 

 for explaining things left short in the class, and re- 

 moving doubts or difficulties that occurred in their 

 reading at home. In this respect he was superior to 

 the other great teacher of that time, Dugald Stewart, 

 under whom we all derived the most solid instruction 

 that lectures could afford, in the most attractive form 

 of eloquence ; but probably partly from the exhaustion 

 of his delivery, and partly from aversion to disputa- 

 tion, which such conferences were apt to occasion, he 

 very often declined to see his pupils after the class 

 rose. 



Playfair's winter course was six months, and the 

 summer three, at the second of which I attended 

 with Lord Folkestone (now Eadnor), whose intimacy, 

 both personal and political, I have since constantly 

 enjoyed, and a better man I have never known, to 

 say nothing of his great abilities. Those who had the 

 advantage of hearing him in the discussions in the 

 House of Lords upon the distress of the country at 

 the end of 1830, and on the Eeform Bill the year 

 after, when he delivered a speech of the most finished 



