THE DEMEANOUR OF ENGLAND. 215 His eagerness early in life made him keen chap, .IX after liunting, and the joy, the triumph he found in going well across country may be reckoned amongst those impulsions which (by furnishing motives for toil) gave the character of something like ' prodigy ' to his youthful career as a journalist. Whilst an under- graduate at Oxford, if not indeed almost a ' freshman,' and surrounded by comrades who were, many of them, still only boys in their ways of life, his desire to provide fitting means for stable expenses reinforced the other strong motives — motives all of them good and generous — which impelled him to use his brain-power in the way that he did ; and he not only toiled as a journalist whilst still what the law calls an ' infant,' but achieved, I suppose, more success of the kind that he sought than — except perhaps in America — had ever been compassed before by any lad under age. He was so constituted that, like the devoted liegeman of chivalrous times, like the advocate still often found in modern courts of law, he could not only ' take up ' with vehemence the cause that he had to support, but become its convinced partisan ; and, therefore, his ready obedience to all the words of command, which from time to time laid down anew the varying path of the newspaper did not prove him to be consciously acting in a spirit of servile ductility. On the contrary, those who best knew him claim a right to believe that, with every alteration ordained, he himself really, honestly changed.
