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His Education.

He spoke little of his early education, and little is known of it. Five years after her husband's death, his mother had married again, this time an Irish baronet, Sir John Thomas, belonging to her father's parish— possibly an old lover; and she gave him a step-brother, Sir Godfrey Thomas, who afterwards lived with him in South Australia and New Zealand, and step-sisters, of whom he sometimes spoke. All that we know of his early schooling is that, in company with a schoolmate, he ran away from the school at Guildford, in Surrey, where he had been placed by his parents, and returned to their home at Bournemouth. It is apparently the habitual act of the rebel. Both Lamennais and Herbert Spencer fled from school; and was not Landor a rebel there? Impatience of restraint was in all four cases at the bottom of it, and in all four the boy, as thus revealed, was the father of the man. In Grey's case the age is not given, but he must have been about thirteen years old. Herbert Spencer, on his flight, was of the same age.

As a consequence of his defective schooling, his education was not classical, and he thus missed the restraining influence that such an education often imparts. In later years, indeed, he professed to have some knowledge of the Latin and Greek languages, but it was probably slight, and he gave little evidence of being intimately acquainted with the Greek and Latin classics. Once, I remember, he read in Ammianus Marcellinus, with the object of ascertaining certain facts, and he contributed to a New Zealand journal in 1884 a humorous article, comparing Carlyle's account of his own and his wife's usage at the hands of the imperious Lady Ashburton with Lucian's account of the domestic philosophers whom great families in the Roman Empire retained as members of their households, as in the eighteenth century French noble families kept pet abbés. In both cases it was doubtless translations that he used.

Designed for his father's profession, he was enrolled at the military college at Sandhurst in his fifteenth year, and there he received all that he ever acquired of the page 6higher education. He remained there for three years, till 1829, when he entered the army. In 1833, after he had gained a lieutenancy, he returned to Sandhurst for three years more in order to complete his military studies. To this later period, perhaps, rather than to the earlier, belong his acquisitions in "the highest branches of mathematical science," when the Board of Examiners desired "to mark their sense of his superior merits and talents." Then, too, it probably was that he learnt the German language, and he used to relate that he and many of his brother cadets busied themselves in translating the poems of Schiller. At Sandhurst he seems to have received the literary and scientific bent that afterwards distinguished him. Plainly, he was no officer of the conventional type—ignorant, prejudiced, perhaps dissipated, lacking broad views and high ends. As we shall see, the purposes of a lifetime lay germinating in his mind.