" One is reminded of Tom Tulliver, who gave up even praying that
he might learn one part of his work: "Please make Mr. --- say that I am
not to do mathematics."
The Saint admits that he lacked neither memory nor wit, "but he took
delight in playing." "The plays and toys of men are called business,
yet, when children fall unto them, the same men punish them." Yet the
schoolmaster was "more fed upon by rage," if beaten in any little
question of learning, than the boy; "if in any match at Ball I had been
maistered by one of my playfellows." He "aspired proudly to be
victorious in the matches which he made," and I seriously regret to say
that he would buy a match, and pay his opponent to lose when he could not
win fairly. He liked romances also, "to have myne eares scratched with
lying fables"--a "lazy, idle boy," like him who dallied with Rebecca and
Rowena in the holidays of Charter House.
Saint Augustine, like Sir Walter Scott at the University of Edinburgh,
was "The Greek Dunce." Both of these great men, to their sorrow and
loss, absolutely and totally declined to learn Greek. "But what the
reason was why I hated the Greeke language, while I was taught it, being
a child, I do not yet understand." The Saint was far from being alone in
that distaste, and he who writes loathed Greek like poison--till he came
to Homer. Latin the Saint loved, except "when reading, writing, and
casting of accounts was taught in Latin, which I held not for lesse
paynefull or penal than the very Greeke.
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