officer severely in the stomach with his head and taking the punishment, hitting
a bully with a clothes-brush and being put back six months in the Royal Military
Academy at Woolwich; these are the early outcrops of one side of his dual
character. Although more soldier than saint, he had a very cheery, genial side.
He was always ready to take even the severest punishment for all his scrapes due
to excessive high spirits. When one of his superiors declared that he would never
make an officer, he felt his honor touched, and his vigorous and expressive reply
was to tear the epaulets from his shoulders and throw them at his superior's feet.
He had already developed some of the rather moody love of seclusion that was
marked later, but religion did not strike him deeply enough to bring him into the
church until he was twenty-one, when he took his first sacrament. On one
occasion he declined promotion within his reach because he would have had to
pass a friend to get it. He acted generally on his impulses, which were perhaps
better than his judgments, took great pleasure in corresponding on religious
topics with his elder sister, and early formed the habit of excessive smoking
which gravely affected his health later. His was the rare combination of inner
repose and confidence, interrupted by spells of gaiety.
Williamson, in his "Life of Holman Hunt,"[38] tells us that at thirteen he was
removed from school as inapt in study. He began to spend his time in drawing in
his copybooks. He was made clerk to an auctioneer, who fortunately encouraged
his passion, and at sixteen was with a calico printer. Here he amused himself by
drawing flies on the window, which his employer tried to brush off. There was
the greatest home opposition to his studying art. After being rejected twice, he
was admitted at seventeen to the Academy school as a probationer, and the next
year, in 1845, as a student. Here he met Millais and Rossetti and was able to
relieve the strain on his mind, which the worry of his father concerning his
course caused him, and very soon his career began.
At thirteen Fitzjames Stephen[39] roused himself to thrash a big boy who had
long bullied him, and became a fighter. In his sixteenth year, he grew nearly five
inches, but was so shy and timid at Eton that he says, "I was like a sensible
grown-up woman among a crowd of rough boys"; but in the reaction to the long
abuse his mind was steeled against oppression, tyranny, and every kind of
unfairness. He read Paine's "Age of Reason," and went "through the Bible as a
man might go through a wood, cutting down trees. The priests can stick them in
again, but they will not make them grow."