In October, 1787, at the age of eighteen, he was sent to Cambridge, and commenced residence at St. John's College. By the University system he seems to have profited little, and he speaks of it with little respect. The daily routine of chapels and lectures, with their regular machinery, and sometimes heartless formality, seems to have affected him with disgust. His ardent soul, warm with youth, enamoured of solitude, and breathing poetry, found little comfort and satisfaction in grammatical niceties or mathematical demonstrations; and as he had learned at school enough of "Euclid" and algebra to give him a twelvemonth's start of the freshmen of his year, he betook himself to more congenial studies, and commenced Italian under a master of the name of Isola, who had known the Poet Gray. An opportunity for distinguishing himself in panegyrical verse he neglected at his first entrance. Dr. Chevalier, master of the college, died soon after; and he tells us that, "according to the custom of the time, his body, after being placed in the coffin was removed to the hall of the college, and the pall spread over the coffin was stuck over by copies of verses, English or Latin, from the pens of the students of St. John's." Wordsworth wrote none. "I did not," said he, "regret that I had been silent on this occasion, as I felt no interest in the deceased person, with whom I had had no intercourse, and whom I had never seen but during his walks in the college grounds."
His chief consolation after the wearying round of studies that did not interest, and discipline that tended only to harass him, was the thought that he was walking where great poets before had walked and mused. What Cicero felt at Athens young Wordsworth did at Cambridge, and rejoiced in the scene familiar in earlier days to his Laureate predecessors, Jonson and Dryden. He took his degree in January, 1791; and as a proof that
