"Latin and Greek" I hear repeating the suave tones of Doctor Florret,
echoing as ever the solemn croak of Correctness, "are useful as mental
gymnastics." My dear Doctor Florret and Co., cannot you, out of the
vast storehouse of really necessary knowledge, select apparatus better
fitted to strengthen and not overstrain the mental muscles of
ten-to-fourteen? You, gentle reader, with brain fully grown, trained
by years of practice to its subtlest uses, take me from your
bookshelf, say, your Browning or even your Shakespeare. Come, you
know this language well. You have not merely learned: it is your
mother tongue. Construe for me this short passage, these few verses:
parse, analyse, resolve into component parts! And now, will you
maintain that it is good for Tommy, tear-stained, ink-bespattered
little brat, to be given AEsop's Fables, Ovid's Metamorphoses to treat
in like manner? Would it not be just as sensible to insist upon his
practising his skinny little arms with hundred pounds dumb-bells?

We were the sons of City men, of not well-to-do professional men, of
minor officials, clerks, shopkeepers, our roads leading through the
workaday world. Yet quite half our time was taken up in studies
utterly useless to us. How I hated them, these youth-tormenting
Shades. Homer! how I wished the fishermen had asked him that absurd
riddle earlier. Horace! why could not that shipwreck have succeeded:
it would have in the case of any one but a classic.

Until one blessed day there fell into my hands a wondrous talisman.

Hearken unto me, ye heavy burdened little brethren of mine. Waste not
your substance upon tops and marbles, nor yet upon tuck (Do ye still
call it "tuck"?), but scrape and save. For in the neighbourhood of