But he went to school, he instantly won the hundred yards
race for boys under twelve, and he came back a young barbarian,
interested in "the theory of touch" (at football), curious in the art of
bowling, and no more capable than you or I of seeing fairies in a green
meadow. He was caught up into the air of the boy's world, and his
imagination was in abeyance for a season.
This is a common enough thing, and rather a melancholy spectacle to
behold. One is tempted to believe that school causes the loss of a good
deal of genius, and that the small boys who leave home poets, and come
back barbarians, have been wasted. But, on the other hand, if they had
been kept at home and encouraged, the chances are that they would have
blossomed into infant phenomena and nothing better. The awful infancy of
Mr. John Stuart Mill is a standing warning. Mr. Mill would probably have
been a much happier and wiser man if he had not been a precocious
linguist, economist, and philosopher, but had passed through a healthy
stage of indifference to learning and speculation at a public school.
Look again, at the childhood of Bishop Thirlwall. His _Primitiae_ were
published (by Samuel Tipper, London, 1808), when young Connop was but
eleven years of age. His indiscreet father "launched this slender bark,"
as he says, and it sailed through three editions between 1808 and 1809.
Young Thirlwall was taught Latin at three years of age, "and at four read
Greek with an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him.
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