.

I remember seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks and box his ears to put it out again." Cowper learned, if not to write Latin verses as well as Vinny Bourne himself, to write them very well, as his Latin versions of some of his own short poems bear witness.

Not only so, but he evidently became a good classical scholar, as classical scholarship was in those days, and acquired the literary form of which the classics are the best school.

Out of school hours he studied independently, as clever boys under the unexacting rule of the old public schools often did, and read through the whole of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ with a friend.

He also probably picked up at Westminster much of the little knowledge of the world which he ever possessed.