After being privately educated by his mother and tutors, he entered Rugby school in 1841.

The children with their tutors and governesses had had tea and their voices were audible from the next room.

Whilst under the first of these tutors, in nine months he read all Thucydides, Sophocles and Sallust, twelve books of Tacitus, the greater part of Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and several plays of Aeschylus and Euripides.

His tutors were the learned Janos Vitez, bishop of Nagyvarad, whom he subsequently raised to the primacy, and the Polish humanist Gregory Sanocki.

He was educated, not at school, but by tutors, Herodes Atticus and M.