Hobhouse was his most intimate friend, and can tell you more of
him than any man. William Bankes also a great deal. I myself recollect
more of his oddities than of his academical qualities, for we lived
most together at a very idle period of _my_ life. When I went up
to Trinity, in 1805, at the age of seventeen and a half, I was
miserable and untoward to a degree. I was wretched at leaving Harrow,
to which I had become attached during the two last years of my stay
there; wretched at going to Cambridge instead of Oxford (there were no
rooms Vacant at Christ-church); wretched from some private domestic
circumstances of different kinds, and consequently about as unsocial
as a wolf taken from the troop. So that, although I knew Matthews, and
met him often _then_ at Bankes's, (who was my collegiate pastor,
and master, and patron,) and at Rhode's, Milnes's, Price's, Dick's,
Macnamara's, Farrell's, Galley Knight's, and others of that _set_
of contemporaries, yet I was neither intimate with him nor with any
one else, except my old schoolfellow Edward Long (with whom I used to
pass the day in riding and swimming), and William Bankes, who was
good-naturedly tolerant of my ferocities.
"It was not till 1807, after I had been upwards of a year away from
Cambridge, to which I had returned again to _reside_ for my
degree, that I became one of Matthews's familiars, by means of H----,
who, after hating me for two years, because I wore a _white hat_, and
a _grey_ coat, and rode a _grey_ horse (as he says himself), took me
into his good graces because I had written some poetry.
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