XII] SHROPSHIRE AND JACK MYTTON 173 



exceptional physical and mental qualities being ruined by the 

 inheritance of great wealth and by a life of pleasure and 

 excitement. Brought up from childhood on a great estate 

 which he soon learnt would be his own ; surrounded by 

 servants and flatterers, by horses and dogs, and seeing that 

 hunting, racing, and shooting were the chief interests and 

 occupations of those around him ; with an intense vitality 

 and superb physique, — who can wonder at his after career ? 

 At school he was allowed £400 a year, and it is said spent 

 £800 — alone enough to demoralize any youth of his dis- 

 position ; and as a natural sequence he was expelled, first 

 from Westminster and then from Harrow. He was then 

 placed with a private tutor for a year. He entered at both 

 Universities but matriculated at neither ; and when nineteen 

 became a cornet in the 7th Hussars, which he joined in 

 France with the army of occupation after Waterloo. He 

 quitted the army when of age, and settled at Halston. 



Such having been his early life it would seem almost 

 impossible that he could have profited much by his very 

 fragmentary education ; yet his biographer assures us that he 

 had a fair amount of classical knowledge, and throughout life 

 would quote Greek and Latin authors with surprising readi- 

 ness, and, moreover, would quote them correctly, and always 

 knew when he made a mistake, repeating the passage again 

 and again till he had it correct. Several examples are given 

 when, in his later years, he quoted passages from Sophocles 

 and Homer to illustrate his own domestic and personal mis- 

 fortunes. But besides these literary tastes he was a man 

 remarkable for many lovable characteristics and especially 

 for a real sympathy for the feelings of others. After being 

 arrested at Calais on bills he had accepted in favour of a 

 person with whom he had had some dealings, as soon as he 

 was released from prison by his solicitor paying the debt, he 

 called upon his former creditor, not to upbraid him, but to 

 walk with him arm-in-arm through the town, in order that the 

 affair might not injure the creditor's character, he being a 

 professional man. As his biographer says, few finer instances 

 of generosity and good feeling are on record. It was this 



