" He criticises an important part of Laplace's
work relative to the demonstration of the parallelogram of forces. In
this same year appeared the first gushes of those poems which
afterwards flowed in torrents.
His somewhat discursive studies had, however, now to give place to a
more definite course of reading in preparation for entrance to the
University of Dublin. The tutor under whom he entered, Charles
Boyton, was himself a distinguished man, but he frankly told the
young William that he could be of little use to him as a tutor, for
his pupil was quite as fit to be his tutor. Eliza Hamilton, by whom
this is recorded, adds, "But there is one thing which Boyton would
promise to be to him, and that was a FRIEND; and that one proof he
would give of this should be that, if ever he saw William beginning
to be UPSET by the sensation he would excite, and the notice he would
attract, he would tell him of it." At the beginning of his college
career he distanced all his competitors in every intellectual
pursuit. At his first term examination in the University he was
first in Classics and first in Mathematics, while he received the
Chancellor's prize for a poem on the Ionian Islands, and another for
his poem on Eustace de St. Pierre.
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