13
so far. He now set about it and in six months
passed the Entrance Examination at Trinity
College which was supposed to be quite up to the
standard of the Previous. He was thus sure of
passing the latter in the following October, which
he did and had full time to devote to law. In
1890 he passed the first part of the Law Tripos
and in 1891, the second, and obtained the degrees
of B.A. and LL.B. at the early age of 21.
Some of his closest friends among Indians in
those days at Cambridge were Nawabzada
Nasrullah Khan of Sachin and the famous
" Ranji," afterwards Maharaja of Navanagar.
Law did not keep out literature and his
enthusiasm for Shakespeare was so great that he
soon communicated some of it to a select circle of
college friends who formed themselves into a
Shakespeare Reading Society. Their example was
followed by some of the students of another
college, St. John's, and they invited him to be a
member of their Society also.
We can see how freely he was indulging his
taste for literature and devoting many hours to
it at the time when he had to study hard for the
jLaw Tripos. I have heard him say that those
three and half years at Cambridge laid the real
foundations of his abiding interest in English
literature.
The plays of.Shakespp.are, and other Elizabethan
dramatists, and the novels of_Scott_engrossed his
mind. He was interested also in the lives of the
great actors of England, of whose art he made a