extent of his reading is evidenced by a list of his books, included in his journal in November 1854: Byron and Edward Gibbon are accompanied by works from Addison, Sydney Smith, Thomas Arnold, and many more writers, classic and contemporary. Summers were often spent in Brussels, where his mother and younger sisters had moved following his father's death in 1853. On one occasion Browning contrived to be included in the royal party when the King of the Belgians visited the Emperor Napoleon III in Calais. Browning left Eton in 1856, having gained entry to King's College, Cambridge, where he began in October. Students at King's, the sister-foundation to Eton, were all Etonians, and Browning, who found their continuing association stifling, generally preferred the company of men from other colleges, especially Trinity, where he found kindred spirits who shared his growing radical approach to education. Unlike his Eton years, Browning's time at Cambridge passed serenely. He was invited to join the intellectual group known as the Apostles, was President of the Cambridge Union in 1859, and that same year was elected a fellow of King's – a lifetime appointment which would provide a fallback should his career in other fields falter. In a wider sphere he discovered his political identity as a Radical Liberal, a disciple of John Stuart Mill. Among the more significant friendships initiated at Cambridge was that with Henry Sidgwick from Trinity College, later a leading educational reformer, of whom Browning would write: "I consulted him on every important matter, and never failed to follow his counsel". Browning graduated in 1860, taking fourth position in the Classical Tripos. His immediate future was undecided; perhaps travel, the English Bar, or an academic post at Cambridge. Instead, he accepted an invitation to return to Eton as an assistant master. Apart from the financial and domestic security this would bring, he saw it as an opportunity to put some of his more enlightened educational ideas into practice. He would later say that his objective as a schoolmaster was "that every pupil of mine should have an experience as different as possible from what my own had been." Eton schoolmaster Young reformer When Browning began teaching at Eton he found the college's governance was largely unchanged from its foundation in the 15th century, and its general curriculum barely reformed from those days: classical Latin and Greek texts learned through repetition, a little