"We think that, in order to secure an attention to Homer and Virgil, we must catch up every man, whether he is to be a clergyman or a duke, begin with him at six years of age, and never quit him till he is twenty; making him conjugate and decline for life and death; and so teaching him to estimate his progress in real wisdom as he can scan the verses of the Greek Tragedians."
He desired that boys should obtain a quick and easy mastery over the authors whom they had to read, and on this account he urged that they should be taught by the use of literal and interlinear translations; but "a literal translation, or any translation, of a school-book is a contraband article in English schools, which a schoolmaster would instantly seize, as a custom-house officer would seize a barrel of gin."
Grammar, gerund-grinding, the tyranny of the Lexicon and the Dictionary, had got the schoolboys of England in their grasp, and the boy "was suffocated with the nonsense of grammarians, overwhelmed with every species of difficulty disproportionate to his age, and driven by despair to pegtop or marbles"; while the British Parent stood and spoke thus with himself:—
"Have I read through Lilly? Have I learnt by heart that most atrocious monument of absurdity, the Westminster Grammar? Have I been whipt for the substantives? whipt for the verbs? and whipt for and with the interjections? Have I picked the sense slowly, and word by word, out of Hederich? and shall my son be exempt from all this misery?… Ay, ay, it's all mighty well; but I went through this myself, and I am determined my children shall do the same."
Another grotesque abuse with regard to which Sydney Smith was a reformer fifty years before his time was compulsory versification.—
"There are few boys who remain to the age of eighteen or nineteen at a Public School without making above ten thousand Latin verses—a greater number than is contained in the Aeneid; and, after he has made this quantity of verses in a dead language, unless the poet should happen to be a very weak man indeed, he never makes another as long as he lives."[4]
"The English clergy, in whose hands education entirely rests, bring up the first young men of the country as if they were all to keep grammar-schools in little country-towns; and a nobleman, upon whose knowledge and liberality the honour and welfare of his country may depend, is diligently worried, for half his life, with the small pedantry of longs and shorts."
The same process is applied at the other end of the social scale. The baker's son, young Crumpet, is sent to a grammar-school, "takes to his books, spends the best years of his life, as all eminent Englishmen do, in making Latin verses, learns that the Crum in Crumpet is long and the pet short, goes to the University, gets a prize for an essay on the Dispersion of the Jews, takes Orders, becomes a Bishop's chaplain, has a young nobleman for his pupil, publishes a useless classic and a Serious Call to the Unconverted, and then goes through the Elysian transitions of Prebendary, Dean, Prelate, and the long train of purple, profit, and power."
In this vivacious passage, Sydney Smith caricatures his own career; which, though it neither began in a baker's shop nor ended in an episcopal palace, followed pretty closely the line of development here indicated. At Winchester he "took to his books" with such goodwill that, in spite of all hindrances, he became an excellent scholar, and laid the strong foundations for a wide and generous culture. His family indeed propagated some pleasing traditions about his schooldays—one of a benevolent stranger who found him reading Virgil when other boys were playing cricket, patted his head, and foretold his future greatness; another of a round-robin from his schoolfellows, declining to compete against him for prizes, "because he always gained them." But this is not history.
From Winchester Sydney Smith passed in natural course to the other of "the two colleges of St. Mary Winton"; and, in the interval between Winchester and Oxford, his father sent him for six months to Normandy, with a view to improving his French. Revolution was in the air, and it was thought a salutary precaution that he should join one of the Jacobin clubs in the town where he boarded, and he was duly entered as "Le Citoyen Smit, Membre Affilié au Club des Jacobins de Mont Villiers."