I had been for the usual time an "oppidan" at Eton; but, though standing high in favor of the Reverend M. A. with whom I was boarded, of the Vice Provost, and other functionaries, I had, unfortunately and unwisely, spent too much of my time with the boxing gloves and fencing foils; at cricket in the playing fields; in rowing on the river--that old traditional amusement of our Etonians; in training for the great 4th of June, the College Regatta day; and in erratic excursions to Windsor and elsewhere--to hope for transference to Cambridge.
This had long been the dearest wish of my father, poor man! but in his letters to me the names of Walpole, Canning, Fox, Wellington, Hallam, and other _alumni_ of our great seminary, were rehearsed again and again without effect; and he never failed to remind me, in the words of old Lembarde, that it is always to Cambridge "the scole of Eton sendeth her ripe fruite."
I had earned the unpleasant reputation of being an idler, though by no means one; and this was oddly enough confirmed, when one day I narrowly escaped drowning in the same pool, if not among the same weeds, where George, Earl Waldegrave, an Eton boy in his tenth year, perished so long ago as 1794, when bathing in the Thames, near a field called the Brocas.
"Existence," says a certain writer, "appears to me scarcely existence, without its struggles and its successes. I should ever like to have some great end before me, for the striving to attain amid a crowd of competitors, would make me feel all the glory of life."
With such vague ideas floating before me, I returned from Eton _last year_, and found myself at my father's house, the old and secluded Rectory of Erlesmere, in a very undecided frame of mind as to the future, and the profession I should adopt.
My father, as before, urged King's College as a proper preparation for any profession.
My mother hinted that our name had shone in the navy, and cast a glance at a large portrait which hung in the dining-room. It represented George Lord Rodney, the castigator of the Spaniards, in a full bob-wig and white satin breeches, boarding the leading ship of the Caracca fleet, amid a whirlwind of torn rigging, smoke, and cannon-balls, forming a background by no means hilarious.