Book Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. LONDON AND ITALY. London University?Letters to his Father?Attends the House of Commons? Goes to Bonn?Life at Milan?Perplexities of Life?Venice?Visits Ireland ?Aubrey de Vere's Reminiscences?Home?Wiseman?Meets Charles MacCarthy?Projected Greek Tour. I Often wonder what will be your future destiny, and I think you are near something very glorious, but you will never reach it. I wish it were in my power to give you all the good I possess, and which you want, for I would willingly pull down my hut to build your palace. These were the words in which one of his college friends, Stafford O'Brien, wrote to Milnes during the year 1830, when his career at Cambridge was drawing to a close. They afford a glimpse of the estimation in which the young man was held by his contemporaries at the University. No one doubted his brilliant powers of mind?the eclecticism of his sympathies, the generosity and geniality of his disposition, his love of paradox, the vastness of the field of knowledge which he sought to cultivate, and the cosmopolitanism of his spirit. All these things, however, seemed, in the eyes of his friends, to tell against his chance of attaining that future distinction which he might otherwise have made his own. It was, as we have seen, no ordinary band of young men of whom he made one at Cambridge, nor was it in itself a small distinction to be the friend and associate of such men. That he was recognised by the ablest among them as the equal of any is proved alike by their letters and by the recollections of the survivors. In the eyes of many, indeed, the judgment passed upon him by Stafford O'Brien would have seemed unwarrantably despondent, for unquestionably Milnes was one of the most brilliant of that bright company of ardent youths. Sir Francis Do...