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CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD

9

machine," by which the rate of falling bodies is measured), who, without any pretence of learning, showed so much sympathy with boyish tastes and aspirations that I began to develop freely. Two of my fellow-pupils, Matthew P. Watt and Hugh William Boulton, were brothers. They were grandsons of my grandfather's friend of the original " Boulton and Watt" firm, and sons of my father's friend, who carried on the manufactory. Hugh William became an exceptionally - handsome and socially favoured Life-Guardsman ; he died young. Matthew was then, subsequently at Cambridge, and again for some years afterwards, an object of reverence to me. I have known few or any who seemed to me his natural superiors in breadth and penetration of intellect, but he was cursed with a fortune far in excess of his simple though cultured needs, which exacted duties from him that he hated. His large fortune also removed the stimulus which necessity gives for getting through work and having done with it, instead of lingering indefinitely. He consequently grew amateurish, wasting thought on ingenious paradoxes and literary trifles, and failed to check a natural tendency towards recluseness and some other oddities of disposition. He gained the University prizes for Greek and Latin Epigrams at Cambridge in 1841, but did not care to compete for other honours. His artistic sense was of a high and classical order. His ideal, like that of Goethe, was a uniform culture of all the higher faculties. There was nothing ignoble in his nature. Whenever I talked with him about my own occasional annoyances, they seemed to become petty through his broad way of looking at