These utterances of cultured wisdom or homely mother-wit are sometimes expressed in phrases almost as amusing, though not so characteristic, as those which Frederic the Great used to scrawl on the margin of reports and despatches for the information of his secretaries.
"We are a little too indulgent to the whims of the people in our employ. We pay a large sum to send a master to a distant station. He dislikes the place. The collector is uncivil; the surgeon quarrels with him; and he must be moved. The expenses of the journey have to be defrayed. Another man is to be transferred from a place where he is comfortable and useful. Our masters run from station to station at our cost, as vapourised ladies at home run about from spa to spa. All situations have their discomforts; and there are times when we all wish that our lot had been cast in some other line of life, or in some other place."
With regard to a proposed coat of arms for Hooghly College, he says
"I do not see why the mummeries of European heraldry should be introduced into any part of our Indian system. Heraldry is not a science which has any eternal rules. It is a system of arbitrary canons, originating in pure caprice. Nothing can be more absurd and grotesque than armorial bearings, considered in themselves. Certain recollections, certain associations, make them interesting in many cases to an Englishman; but in those recollections and associations the natives of India do not participate. A lion, rampant, with a folio in his paw, with a man standing on each side of him, with a telescope over his head, and with a Persian motto under his feet, must seem to them either very mysterious, or very absurd."
In a discussion on the propriety of printing some books of Oriental science, Macaulay writes
"I should be sorry to say anything disrespectful of that liberal and generous enthusiasm for Oriental literature which appears in Mr. Sutherland's minute; but I own that I cannot think that we ought to be guided in the distribution of the small sum, which the Government has allotted for the purpose of education, by considerations which seem a little romantic. That the Saracens a thousand years ago cultivated mathematical science is hardly, I think, a reason for our spending any money in translating English treatises on mathematics into Arabic. Mr. Sutherland would probably think it very strange if we were to urge the destruction of the Alexandrian Library as a reason against patronising Arabic literature in the nineteenth century. The undertaking may be, as Mr. Sutherland conceives, a great national work. So is the breakwater at Madras. But under the orders which we have received from the Government, we have just as little to do with one as with the other."
Now and then a stroke, aimed at Hooghly College, hits nearer home. That men of thirty should be bribed to continue their education into mature life "seems very absurd. Moghal Jan has been paid to learn something during twelve years. We are told that he is lazy and stupid; but there are hopes that in four years more he will have completed his course of study. We have had quite enough of these lazy, stupid schoolboys of thirty."
"I must frankly own that I do not like the list of books. Grammars of rhetoric and grammars of logic are among the most useless furniture of a shelf. Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That is worth all the grammars of rhetoric and logic in the world. We ought to procure such books as are likely to give the children a taste for the literature of the West; not books filled with idle distinctions and definitions, which every man who has learned them makes haste to forget. Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme? Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis? I am not joking, but writing quite seriously, when I say that I would much rather order a hundred copies of Jack the Giant-killer for our schools than a hundred copies of any grammar of rhetoric or logic that ever was written."
"Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and Rome are miserable performances, and I do not at all like to lay out 50 pounds on them, even after they have received all Mr. Pinnock's improvements. I must own too, that I think the order for globes and other instruments unnecessarily large. To lay out 324 pounds at once on globes alone, useful as I acknowledge those articles to be, seems exceedingly profuse, when we have only about 3,000 pounds a year for all purposes of English education. One 12-inch or 18-inch globe for each school is quite enough; and we ought not, I think, to order sixteen such globes when we are about to establish only seven schools. Useful as the telescopes, the theodolites, and the other scientific instruments mentioned in the indent undoubtedly are, we must consider that four or five such instruments run away with a year's salary of a schoolmaster, and that, if we purchase them, it will be necessary to defer the establishment of schools."
At one of the colleges at Calcutta the distribution of prizes was accompanied by some histrionic performances on the part of the pupils.