Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/573

 on friendliest terms. The prince only reached home in June, after six months' absence, and was then formally invested K.G. with full ceremony. On 26 June Prince Hohenlohe, the future chancellor of Germany, dined at Buckingham Palace, and learned from the prince's lips something of his travels. The young man gave the German visitor an impression of good breeding, short stature, and nervous awe of his father.

Prince Albert was not willing to allow his son's educational course to end prematurely. An academic training was at once devised on comprehensive lines, which included attendance at three universities in succession. A beginning was made at Edinburgh in the summer of 1859. Holyrood Palace was prepared for his residence. His chief instruction was in science under the guidance of Lyon Playfair, whose lectures at the university on the composition and working of iron-ore the prince attended regularly. He showed interest in Playfair's teaching, visiting with him many factories to inspect chemical processes, and proved his courage and obedient temper by dipping at Playfair's bidding in one of the workshops his bare arm into a hissing cauldron of molten iron by way of illustrating that the experiment could be made with impunity (, Notes from a Diary, 1877–86, ii. 27). At the same time Leonhard Schmitz taught him Roman history, Italian, German, and French. For exercise he paraded with the 16th lancers, who were stationed in the city, and made excursions to the Trossachs and the Scottish lakes. But the stay in Edinburgh was brief.

On 3 Sept. the prince consort held a conference there with the youth's professors and tutors to decide on his future curriculum. The Edinburgh experience was proving tedious and cheerless. The prince mixed with none but serious men advanced in years. The public at large was inclined to protest that now when it seemed time to terminate the state of pupilage, there were visible signs of an almost indefinite extension. ‘Punch’ voiced the general sentiment in a poem entitled ‘A Prince at High Pressure’ (24 Sept. 1859). But Prince Albert was relentless, and in October the prince migrated to Oxford on conditions as restrictive as any that went before. The prince matriculated as a nobleman from Christ Church, of which Dr. Liddell was dean, on 17 Oct.

It was the first recorded occasion on which a Prince of Wales had become an undergraduate of the University of Oxford. Tradition alone vouches for the story of the matriculation in 1398 of Prince Henry, afterwards Henry V—Prince Hal, with whom the new undergraduate was occasionally to be linked in satire hereafter. No other preceding Prince of Wales was in any way associated with Oxford. But Prince Albert's son was not to enjoy any of an undergraduate's liberty. A special residence, Frewen Hall, a house in the town, was taken for him. Col. Bruce accompanied him and rarely left him. Prince Albert impressed on Bruce the boy's need of close application to study, and of resistance to social calls, as well as the undesirability of any free mingling with undergraduates. Herbert Fisher, a student of Christ Church, was on the recommendation of Dean Liddell appointed his tutor in law and constitutional history. He did not attend the college lectures, but Goldwin Smith, professor of modern history, with three or four chosen undergraduates, waited on him at his residence and gave him a private course in history. The text-book was the ‘Annals of England,’ by W. E. Flaherty (1855), and the professor only partially compensated by epigram for the dryness of the work. By Prince Albert's wish, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, then professor of ecclesiastical history, gave him some religious instruction, while Dr. Henry Acland, his medical attendant, occasionally invited him to social gatherings at his house. With both Stanley and Acland the prince formed very friendly relations. He saw comparatively little of the undergraduates. He confirmed his acquaintance with Mr. Charles Wood. At the same time fox-hunting was one of his permitted indulgences, and the recreation brought him into touch with some young men of sporting tastes, to a few of whom, like Mr. Henry Chaplin and Sir Frederick Johnstone, he formed a lifelong attachment. He hunted with the South Oxfordshire hounds, of which Lord Macclesfield was master, and he saw his first fox killed near Garsington on 27 Feb. 1860, when he was presented with the brush. Hunting was his favourite sport till middle age. The discipline which Col. Bruce enforced prohibited smoking. But the prince made surreptitious experiments with tobacco, which soon induced a fixed habit.

The prince remained in residence at Oxford with few interruptions during term time until the end of the summer term 1860. He was summoned to Windsor on