He was wont in after life to speak of this
time with bitterness; a delicate child, he was starved on
insufficient diet; and an eloquent passage in "Eothen" depicts his
intellectual fall from the varied interests and expanding
enthusiasm of liberal home teaching to the regulation gerund-
grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. "The dismal change
is ordained, and then--thin meagre Latin with small shreds and
patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your
early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel
grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds
and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down
you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of 'Scriptores
Romani,'--from Greek poetry, down, down to the cold rations of
'Poetae Graeci,' cut up by commentators, and served out by school-
masters!"
At Eton--under Keate, as all readers of "Eothen" know--he was
contemporary with Gladstone, Sir F. Hanmer, Lords Canning and
Dalhousie, Selwyn, Shadwell. He wrote in the "Etonian," created
and edited by Mackworth Praed; and is mentioned in Praed's poem on
Surly Hall as
"Kinglake, dear to poetry,
And dear to all his friends.
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