attitude was impossible. The masters must have hated the school much
more than the boys did. Just as you cannot imprison a man without
imprisoning a warder to see that he does not escape, the warder being
tied to the prison as effectually by the fear of unemployment and
starvation as the prisoner is by the bolts and bars, so these poor
schoolmasters, with their small salaries and large classes, were as much
prisoners as we were, and much more responsible and anxious ones. They
could not impose the heroic attitude on their employers; nor would they
have been able to obtain places as schoolmasters if their habits had
been heroic. For the best of them their employment was provisional: they
looked forward to escaping from it into the pulpit. The ablest and most
impatient of them were often so irritated by the awkward, slow-witted,
slovenly boys: that is, the ones that required special consideration and
patient treatment, that they vented their irritation on them ruthlessly,
nothing being easier than to entrap or bewilder such a boy into giving a
pretext for punishing him.




My Scholastic Acquirements

The results, as far as I was concerned, were what might have been
expected. My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything
but Latin and Greek. When I went there as a very small boy I knew a good
deal of Latin grammar which I had been taught in a few weeks privately
by my uncle. When I had been several years at school this same uncle
examined me and discovered that the net result of my schooling was that
I had forgotten what he had taught me, and had learnt nothing else. To
this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the