Sir Robert Hart | Page 4

took it up eagerly, and from that day on devoted himself to study with an enthusiasm as thorough as sudden. Everything there was to study, he studied--even stole fifteen minutes from his lunch hour to work at Hebrew--till the boys laughingly nicknamed him "Stewpot" and the "Consequential Butt."
The result was that at fifteen he was ready to leave the school the first boy of the College class, and his parents were puzzled what to do with him next. His father considered it unwise to send such a young lad away to Trinity College, Dublin, where he would be among companions far older than himself; and the end of the matter was that he went to the newly founded Queen's College at Belfast instead because that was nearer Hillsborough and the family circle.
He passed the entrance examinations easily, and of the twelve scholarships offered he carried off the twelfth--nothing, however, to what he was to do later. The second year there were seven scholarships, and he got the seventh; the third there were five, and he got the first. He heard the news of this last triumph one afternoon in a little second-hand book-store where the collegians often gathered. It was a gloomy day wrapped in a grey blanket of rain, and he was not feeling particularly confident--his besetting sin from the first was modesty--when suddenly a fellow-student rushed up and said, "Congratulations, Hart. You've come out first."
"What," retorted Hart, astonished, "is the list published already?" They told him where it was to be seen, and he hurried off to look for himself. Quite likely they were playing a joke on him, he thought. But it was no joke after all; his name stood before all the others--though he could scarcely believe his own eyes, and did not write home about it till next day, for fear that the good luck might turn to bad in the night.
Unfortunately these successes left him little time for the sports which should be a boy's most profitable form of idling. He ran no races after he left Taunton, where he was known for the fleetest pair of heels in the school; he played no games, neither cricket nor football, not even bowls or rounders--but these amusements he probably missed the less as they were not popular at Belfast, the College being new and without muscular traditions, and the students chiefly young men of narrow means and broad ambitions.
On the rare occasions when he had time for recreation, he either made a few friends in the world of books--Emerson's "Essays" influenced him most--or tried his own hand at literature. Once he even went so far as to write a poem and send it to a Belfast newspaper, signing it "C'est Moi." It was printed, and, being short of money at the time, he wrote his father that his first published writing had appeared, and received from his proud parent ��10 by way of encouragement.
But his literary success was short-lived. When he tried the same editor with another effusion signed with the same pen-name, the unfeeling man actually printed in his columns: "'C'est Moi's' last is not worth the paper it is written on." Alas! for the prophet in his own country. Years afterwards he got another criticism just as harsh from another Irish paper. It was a review of his book "These from the Land of Sinim," and the Irish reviewer for some unknown reason rated the book thoroughly, declared its opinions were ridiculous, its English neither forcible nor elegant, and concluded with the biting remark, "We hear that the writer has also composed poems which were lost in the Peking Siege, thank God."
In 1853 Hart was ready to pass his final Degree Examinations. They were held in Dublin, where the three newly established Irish Colleges--Cork, Galway and Belfast--took them together. Belfast had been fortunate the year before in carrying off several "firsts," and the men were anxious to do as well as, or even better than on the previous occasion. So they arranged amongst themselves that each should cram some particular subject and try for honours in it.
Young Hart, with his character compounded of energy and ambition, agreed to take two as his share. One was English, the other Logic, which he had studied under the famous Dr. McCosh, which he delighted in, and which undoubtedly developed his natural talent for getting directly at the point of an intricate matter. He worked eighteen hours a day during the last three weeks before the Literature Examination, and when it came he did well--at least, so he supposed.
The rule was that only those in each class who had shown marked ability and knowledge of their subject at the "pass" examination should be recommended for re-examination for honours. But to his surprise, when the list was read