What chums Tom Taylor and Charles Lamb had been
O'er bottled porter and the Fairy Queen!
In youth, one day, seeking forbidden fruit
Tom tumbled from the branches with his loot,
And broken bones compelled the lad to go
On straddling crutches, warily and slow,
Counting the pebbles on his path below.
The noisy pleasures of the open air,
The football kicked exuberant here and there.
Cricket, beloved of sinewy juvenals,
And golf with all its hazards, clubs and balls,
Were not in Taylor's province: so he turned
To calmer pastimes where the ingle burned,
And when the whole world turned to goals and tees
He took to Iliads and to Odysseys.
He'd croon like one possessed the magic strain
Of heroes tossed along the unvintaged main,
And, crutch aloft in air, would fondly beat
Time to the rushing of the poet's feet.
Poetry was all his solace: those bright dames
That old Dan Chaucer in his rapture names,
And those in Villon's pages that appear
As dazzling-white as snows of yester-year,
Trooped past his eye in long procession fair.
O, Sovereign Virgin, what a crowd was there!
Helen, alas! with Paris by her side,
On the high deck crossing the sunny tide,
Circé, bright-moving in her godlike bloom
Before the throbbing music of the loom.
The love-lorn heroines of Shakespeare's plays,
The red-cheeked country girls of Burns's lays,
Would to his raptured eye the tear-drop bring,
And set his crazy quill a-sonnetting.
VOGUE OF LATIN IN FORMER TIMES.
The old-world schoolmaster believed Latin was a universal specific. He loved the language and knew all the flock of frisky little exceptions of gender and conjugation, even as a shepherd knows his sheep. He gave his pupils gentle doses of the Delectus, and watched with eager, almost menacing, eye, for the working of the charm. It is quite possible that no pupil ever went over that Delectus, with its world-weary fragments of trite morality, without a feeling of pleasure at the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet it was educative, and moreover a boy was equipped for life with quotations suiting every juncture. Fate was powerless against one who had mastered the Delectus. The faculty of Latin quotation was to some extent also a badge of respectability. Fancy, too, the glory of being the exclusive possessor in a mixed company of the knowledge that Castor and Pollux came out of the one egg! It was a sore drawback to a boy once upon a time if he were shaky on the compounds of fero.
"The pest of the present day is the prevalence of examinations:" these, it is alleged, have destroyed the grand old freedom of learning which gave full scope for the individuality alike of teacher and pupil. Oh! those were days of the gods, when five hours were spent daily burrowing in Virgil and Horace! Arcadia was realised—a sunny clime of Nymphs, Fauns, and Graces. The supreme luxury of abundant time—the leisurely chewing of sweet-phrased morsels—is gone: it is gone, that chastity of phrase and perfection of idiom, which felt a bad quantity like a wound. The examination craze has destroyed the classical dominie, and the intrusion of science, falsely so-called, has well-nigh asphyxiated the Napææ of the dells. It was formerly possible for the teacher to develop to the full his literary taste and declaim the sonorous tit-bits of Virgil till the tears started from his eyes. Now the instructors of youth seem to regard the works of the tuneful Mantuan as composed for the purpose of illustrating the use of the Latin subjunctive. Youths cannot get at the Aeneid, the spirit and majesty of it, I mean, owing to the pestilential numbers of grammatical reminiscences recalled by almost every line. When once you begin to set examination papers on a subject, the romance seems to evaporate. There is something withering about test-questions. This modern disease of grammatical annotation, engendered largely by prosaic examiners, who have published grammars, is spreading to the English Classics, and we may soon expect Burns to furnish a text for exceptional scansion, bob-wheel metrics and general philological catechising. Items which glide effortless into the brain in desultory reading are not so easily remembered if the examination is in store. Certain gentlemen have recently been reading Milton with a pair of compasses in order to discover the exact point of the cæsural pause in every line: they give figures, strike percentages, and set questions which even the leading character in "Paradise Lost" couldn't answer. Literary microscopy is likely to ruin Shakespeare's reputation in school and would have done so long ago but for Lamb's Tales—a darling compilation and by far the best introduction to the poet. "Shakespeare is a horrid man" is the deliberate verdict of the schoolgirl who has been teased to death by the notes within the tawny covers of the Clarendon Press Edition. And fancy what Chaucer's Prologue must seem like, taught by a man bent only on philological hunts, variant readings, and a complete explanation of all the final e's.
TEACHERS AND EXAMINATIONS.
It has always seemed to me a matter for surprise that those who had for years studied the elements of Latin and Greek at school (and that with no small difficulty), should entirely neglect these tongues afterwards and read nothing composed in them. Most elaborate preparations are made to reach the Promised Land, but the weary passenger never gets there. Can it be that the preparations are too elaborate?[24] They are certainly not very interesting, and are, indeed, well fitted to disgust pupils with the classical tongues. Sir William Ramsay of Aberdeen, in a letter to the Herald some time ago, spoke strongly on this subject.
Sir William says, with justice, that a teacher should teach his subject without any thought of examination. Every teacher would like to do that if he could. As a matter of fact, the secondary schoolmaster is forced to become a crammer. He codifies the catch questions of previous university preliminaries, excogitates similar weird lists of anomalies and exceptions, and doses the pupils on such stuff instead of really teaching the important parts of his subject. Experience seems to prove that the most effective way of rendering a subject dry, uneducational, and generally useless is to set examination papers on it. What can be more outrageous and grotesque than the practice of setting out-of-the-way questions because of the ease thus afforded to the examiners in correcting the answers of the helpless and puzzled candidates! Even though the questions set were plain and straightforward, it would be absurd to suppose that an hour or two in an examination hall could furnish sufficient data to pass or fail a candidate.
It used to be the glory of our universities that an average college class contained representatives of every grade of society in the land. Professor Ramsay says it is not so now: the professors have become pedagogic coaches, and the students grind rather than study. Sir William assures us that many who would make good students are frightened away by the preliminary examination. It would be interesting to know where these latter go when they leave school. Do they rush off to business at once, or do they proceed with their education in some extra-mural way? If they can afford the time, the university is certainly the place for them. Let the university gates be opened as wide as possible to all serious-minded youths, and let it be remembered that it is not necessarily those who sweat most over their books or take the highest honours that get most good from attendance at the lectures.
It does not appear that, at present, our universities are adequately in touch with the nation. The great commercial community of Glasgow does not benefit nearly enough from having a famous seat of learning in its midst. We might learn a lesson from the Sorbonne how best to nationalise our universities. In Paris, the lecture halls are open to all, and it is possible for either native or foreigner to listen for hours daily, if he be so minded, to some of the finest and most erudite orators and scholars of Europe. There are, it is true, special students' courses, from which the general public is excluded, but the most important lectures are open to all. Hence the Sorbonne is a national institution in every sense of the word. I do not say that Glasgow does not benefit a little from the corps of professors at Gilmorehill. But the benefit is spasmodic, discontinuous, and extremely limited. Some of the professors do at times come down into the open and speak words of wisdom. But more is wanted than that if the universities are to be saved from denationalisation. We hear of Dugald Stewart's class-room being, in the old days, crowded with the keenest intellects of the Capital. But a university was not then a kind of higher-grade secondary school.