North-countrymen came up from the grammar-schools of their district, and were among the toughest competitors in the tripos. Wordsworth, no doubt, looked like a senior wrangler in embryo. He had not, indeed, the special taste for mathematics. There is an entry, it is said, in one of the Cambridge registers about a youth who applied for admission: sed, Euclide viso, cohorruit et evasit. Wordsworth did not precisely adopt that course; but he neglected his Euclid, and took to learning Italian and reading Spenser. His poetical genius, however, was not revealed to others, and not shown by the ordinary symptoms. He was not, like Coleridge, who was to follow him to Cambridge, sensitive, emotional, and sentimental. However strong his feelings, he was stern and little given to expansive utterance. He formed no intimate friendships. Proud independence and power of standing on his own sturdy legs would be his most conspicuous qualities, and went naturally with the outside of a country bumpkin. His boyhood had stimulated these tendencies. He had been happy at his school at Hawkshead, and had found congenial masters; but their great merit had been that they had cared nothing for modern
