YOUTH AND EARLY TRAVELS 53 



home. Old prints show that in the eighteenth century it had, 

 in contrast to its neighbour, a formal garden of some extent, 

 with terraces, obelisks, parterres, and specimens of the topiary 

 art. This has been completely done away with by later 

 owners. 



As soon as he was old enough, at the age of six, the little Horace 

 Benedict was sent to the College the public school of the city and 

 at once won his first success by obtaining the Reading Prize. His 

 biographer Senebier always on literary stilts celebrates this 

 ' triumph ' as ' the spark which lit in him the thirst for glory and 

 led him to labour with so much ardour to merit it.' Surely a 

 singularly unhappy flourish : for the conscious pursuit of glory 

 is the last characteristic we shall recognise in the future career 

 of a searcher after knowledge as modest and patient as he was 

 earnest. 



At school the boy began to show that he had ideas of his own ; 

 and, like most boys with ideas, he had also strong tastes, which to 

 some extent interfered with his lessons. His country home, no 

 doubt, helped to give him a zest for outdoor life. Long rambles 

 and reading romances were his chief dissipations. But the child 

 had the courage to place himself under discipline. He resolved 

 to limit his country walks to one a week, and to put aside 

 novels. In after years he could recall with pride that on his way 

 home from school he had resisted the temptation to open the 

 covers of the tempting volumes he was in the habit of bringing 

 back for his mother. 



Of his school life and teaching de Saussure retained no 

 favourable recollections. In after years he gave the most con- 

 vincing proof of his feeling by his refusal to send his own children 

 to the College. 



From school de Saussure, at the age of fourteen, passed on to 

 the Academy, or, as we should call it, University. In his class, 

 or in that above him, we find the names of the fathers of Sismondi, 

 the historian, and de Candolle, the botanist, and of members of 

 families subsequently connected with our own country, a Romilly, 

 a Pasteur, a Thellusson, and a Marcet. 



Before he was eighteen the boy in the weekly tramps that 

 formed a welcome interlude to classwork had explored many of 

 the lower mountains in the immediate neighbourhood of Geneva : 



