Social intercourse with Natives in Calcutta-Visit to Pátshalís- Business in the University-Letters-Departure for Assam- Journals and Letters-Return to Kooshtea-The Bishop's Consecra- tion of a Cemetery-Return to the River-Unprotected Causeway- UNIV. OF LIFE OF BISHOP COTTON. CHAPTER I. BIRTH-DEATH OF HIS FATHER-EDUCATION AT WESTMINSTER SCHOOL UNDERGRADUATE LIFE AT TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE-HABITS AND FRIENDS-VAUGHAN-CONYBEARE-LETTER PRINCIPLES-EARLY MISS MITFORD. FROM GEORGE EDWARD LYNCH COTTON was born October 29, 1813, at Chester, at the house of his grandmother, the widow of Dr. Cotton, Dean of Chester. On November 13, a fortnight after the child's birth, his father, Captain Cotton, of the 7th Fusileers, and major of brigade to Major-General Byng, serving in the second division of the British army, was killed at the head of his brigade, while in the act of storming a redoubt on the left of the enemy's intrenchments, before the village of Ainhoué, in the battle of the Nivelle. His son was baptised in the cathedral, and spent his childhood in the town of Chester. To his mother, in the belief of those who knew him best, he owed his chief early stimulus to those literary and intellectual tastes which he never lost. His marked capacity for humour, on the other hand, though doubtless fostered by her acuteness and vivacity, was rather an 44 B inheritance from his father's family. But thrown as he necessarily was from the peculiarities of his early childhood most upon himself, the sweetness of temper and even balance of mind, which distinguished him through life, and the power of absorbing the good and eschewing the evil of surrounding circumstances, were gifts peculiarly his own. He had a keen interest in his father's family. He much enjoyed the only visit he ever paid at Combermere while the veteran head of his house, the first Viscount Combermere, was still alive; and it was with the truest pleasure that he revived in India a long dormant claim of cousinship with Sir Arthur and Sir Sidney Cotton. But it was with his father's brothers and sisters that he was chiefly thrown, for they were fondly attached to him from his earliest infancy, and regarded him as a child of much promise. He was full of delight in family recollections. Certainly,' he says in a letter to a muchloved pupil, the friendships which we form for ourselves are great sources of happiness, yet there is a charm about relationship which other intimacies rarely have. It is so extremely delightful to call people by their Christian names, and talk over all the old stories of one's childhood, and do exactly what one likes.' In 1845, he married his cousin Sophia Anne, eldest daughter of the late Rev. Henry Tomkinson, of Reaseheath in Cheshire, and family ties were thus in after days strengthened by a yet deeper bond, which can only be appreciated by those who knew the blessedness of that undivided union of twenty-one years. 6 When he was between eleven and twelve years old, that is to say in January 1825, he entered Westminster, in the Lower School, and was admitted upon the Foundation at Whitsuntide, 1828. Some of his Westminster contemporaries, one of whom was amongst his earliest and most intimate friends, have thus described their recollections. CH. I.] SCHOOL-DAYS AT WESTMINSTER. 3 College was at this time an abominable place in point of the hardships and tyranny to be endured, and on the score of morality also very bad indeed. The fags, fewer in number than their masters, were simply menial servants wholly in the power of the seniors, and partially of the "third election," which rank Cotton had attained when I entered college. Cotton himself had suffered much under this system in the earlier stages of his course, and had contracted a retiring and guarded manner. Being of a weakly constitution and unadventurous spirit he had never thrown himself with zest into the games of the school; and the college rules, which forced the juniors to take their part in cricket, football, hockey, and boating, with plentiful application of punishment to bunglers, had unfortunately created a distaste for these exercises, fostered further by his own studious and somewhat diffident disposition, and his repugnance to all that was brutal and degrading was perceptible even then. And the dry quaint humour of his peculiar genius was used to soften the harsh and repulsive character of the life that was so distasteful to him, to soften it for others as well as for himself. Surrounded as he was by associates with whom he had little sympathy, he fell spontaneously into a method resembling the "Socratic irony." Talking with those who were too strong for him to check, when bent on some cruel or discreditable act, he would lead them unawares into some admission which showed their conduct in its true colours, and he would drive home this conclusion by some remark which I hesitate to call sarcastic, because it was never unkind. And he would talk to the juniors in a tone of pleasant banter which cheered them under their task-work, and which but expressed that considerate sympathy which the atmosphere of the place forbade to be shown more openly. It was always a relief to me when my turn came round to be assigned to the service of the "third election," |