Nothing in the retrospect of life strikes me as more astonishing than
the rapid mental growth that must have taken place between the date of
my father's death and its second or third anniversary. When my father
died I was simply a child, though rather a precocious one, as the
journal in Wales testifies; but between two and three years after that
event the child had become a boy, with a keen taste for literature,
which, if it had been taken advantage of by his teachers, ought to have
made his education a more complete success than it ever became.

The misfortune was that the classics were not taught as literature at
all, but as exercises in grammar and prosody. They were dissected by
teachers who were simply lecturers on the science of language, and who
had not large views even about that. Our whole attention being directed
to the technicalities of the pedagogue, we did not perceive that the
classic authors had produced poems which, as literature, were not
inferior to those of our best English poets. So it happened that those
of us who had literary tastes were content to satisfy them in reading
English authors, and left them, as it were, at the door of the
classroom. I worked courageously enough at the Latin books which were
set before me, but never found the slightest enjoyment in them; indeed,
it was only much later, and through the medium of French and Italian,
that I gained some partial access to the literary beauty of Latin. As
for Greek, I began it vigorously at Doncaster, but I did not get beyond
the rudiments during my stay there.




CHAPTER VIII.