does not joke any more. The literary life is very like any other, in
London, or is it that we do not see it aright, not having the eyes of
genius? Well, a life on the ocean wave, too, may not be so desirable as
it seems in Marryat's novels: so many a lad whom he tempted into the navy
has discovered. The best part of the existence of a man of letters is
his looking forward to it through the spectacles of Titmarsh.

One can never say how much one owes to a school-master who was a friend
of literature, who kept a houseful of books, and who was himself a
graceful scholar, and an author, while he chose to write, of poetic and
humorous genius. Such was the master who wrote the "Day Dreams of a
Schoolmaster," Mr. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, to whom, in this place, I
am glad to confess my gratitude after all these many years. While we
were deep in the history of Pendennis we were also being dragged through
the Commentaries of Caius Julius Caesar, through the Latin and Greek
grammars, through Xenophon, and the Eclogues of Virgil, and a depressing
play of Euripides, the "Phoenissae." I can never say how much I detested
these authors, who, taken in small doses, are far, indeed, from being
attractive. Horace, to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes to have nothing
to say, and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious manner. Then
Cowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes, seems
arid enough to a school-boy. 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,