"
Dr. Gatty remembers his "determined pale face"; thinks that he made
his mark on the river rather than in the playing fields, being a
good oar and swimmer. His great friend at school was Savile, the
"Methley" of his travels, who became successively Lord Pollington
and Earl of Mexborough. The Homeric lore which Methley exhibited
in the Troad, is curiously illustrated by an Eton story, that in a
pugilistic encounter with Hoseason, afterwards an Indian Cavalry
officer, while the latter sate between the rounds upon his second's
knee, Savile strutted about the ring, spouting Homer.
Kinglake entered at Trinity, Cambridge, in 1828, among an
exceptionally brilliant set--Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, John
Sterling, Trench, Spedding, Spring Rice, Charles Buller, Maurice,
Monckton Milnes, J. M. Kemble, Brookfield, Thompson. With none of
them does he seem in his undergraduate days to have been intimate.
Probably then, as afterwards, he shrank from camaraderie, shared
Byron's distaste for "enthusymusy"; naturally cynical and self-
contained, was repelled by the spiritual fervour, incessant logical
collision, aggressive tilting at abuses of those young "Apostles,"
already
"Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would
yield,
Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,"
waxing ever daily, as Sterling exhorted, "in religion and
radicalism.
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