Sir Robert Hart | Page 4

rubbing his hands on his knees, the small one
aggravatingly cool and collected. At last the examiner called for a list
of the Kings of Israel. Freckleton stumbled. The question passed to
Hart, and, while the boys sat tense with excitement, he answered
fluently and correctly. The first place was his, and a hearty cheer
greeted his unexpected success.
After this little victory the Governor of the school remarked to him:
"Now you see what you can do when you try, Hart; why don't you try?"
Why not, indeed? Here was a new idea. He accepted it as a challenge,
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