I remember reading ahead, in Cowper,
instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work. His observations
on public schools were not uninteresting, but the whole English school-
work of those days was repugnant. One's English education was all got
out of school.
As to Greek, for years it seemed a mere vacuous terror; one invented for
one's self all the current arguments against "compulsory Greek." What
was the use of it, who ever spoke in it, who could find any sense in it,
or any interest? A language with such cruel superfluities as a middle
voice and a dual; a language whose verbs were so fantastically irregular,
looked like a barbaric survival, a mere plague and torment. So one
thought till Homer was opened before us. Elsewhere I have tried to
describe the vivid delight of first reading Homer, delight, by the way,
which St. Augustine failed to appreciate. Most boys not wholly immersed
in dulness felt it, I think; to myself, for one, Homer was the real
beginning of study. One had tried him, when one was very young, in Pope,
and had been baffled by Pope, and his artificial manner, his "fairs," and
"swains." Homer seemed better reading in the absurd "crib" which Mr.
Buckley wrote for Bohn's series. Hector and Ajax, in that disguise, were
as great favourites as Horatius on the Bridge, or the younger Tarquin.
Scott, by the way, must have made one a furious and consistent
Legitimist.
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28