historical subjects. The arithmetic seems to have been mainly of a very
simple and severely practical kind, especially the computation of
interest and compound interest; and the philology generally, both
grammar and criticism, was singularly narrow, uninteresting, and
useless. Of what conceivable advantage can it have been to any human
being to know the name of the mother of Hecuba, of the nurse of
Anchises, of the stepmother of Anchemolus, the number of years Acestes
lived, and how many casks of wine the Sicilians gave to the Phrygians?
Yet these were the dispicable _minutiae_ which every schoolmaster was
then expected to have at his fingers' ends, and every boy-scholar to
learn at the point of the ferule--trash which was only fit to be
unlearned the moment it was known.

For this kind of verbal criticism and fantastic archaeology Seneca, who
had probably gone through it all, expresses a profound and very rational
contempt. In a rather amusing passage[6] he contrasts the kind of use
which would be made of a Virgil lesson by a philosopher and a
grammarian. Coming to the lines,

"Each happiest day for mortals speeds the first,
Then crowds disease behind and age accurst,"

the philosopher will point out why and in what sense the early days of
life are the best days, and how rapidly the evil days succeed them, and
consequently how infinitely important it is to use well the golden dawn
of our being. But the verbal critic will content himself with the
remark that Virgil always uses _fugio_ of the flight of time, and
always joins "old age" with "disease," and consequently that these are
tags to be remembered, and plagiarized hereafter in the pupils'
"_original_ composition." Similarly, if the book in hand be Cicero's