He dawdled before Troy with the Homeric heroes, fought with them, listened to their gossip, bathed with them, sacrificed with them.
The Latin tongue revealed other emotions than the frenzy of doubt as to whether Caius and Balbus should build unending walls.
To him, Roman Horace, growing fat, unwieldy, laughing at his own disadvantages in subtle Latin verse, lolling about Mæcenas’ villa, became a live acquaintance, as real as the people he rubbed against in the street.
And every day the number of his acquaintance grew.
As real, more definite than the swarm of boys with whom he had played at school, became Charlemagne and Clovis and Capet, Simon de Montfort, and Bastard William of Normandy and the First and Third Edwards of England, and Cromwell and Chatham and the men of the French Revolution. The very hours of the day, seasons of the year, became frequented with the association of the great dead, so that in the after-years of his manhood, at the break of day it almost seemed that there stole across the years, back over the edge of the drowsy world, out of old pilastered Greece, the hushed image of that festival drawing to its end when Socrates rises from the symposium, the last of his mighty boon companions, drawing his garments about him as he passes out from them that he has outstayed, where they lay adrowse and overcome with wine on couch and floor—in such strange fashion giving to the decaying genius of Greece the new ideals that were to prepare the civilized world for the coming of its Christ—a strange uncouth figure in a wondrous mist of dawn.
The twilight became haunted with the drowsy music of Grey’s Elegy, sounding to some mystic fugue played with Handelian dignity upon the aerial organ of the winds.
The history of the mightiest people the world has seen leaped into life again, seen through the gossip eyes of them that had watched its pageant pass, its comedy and its tragedy—Pepys and Boswell, and the splendid gossips of their day—or in the mighty music of Carlyle’s colossal and glowing imagination, of Oldmixon, of Macaulay and of Green.
In fact, the big gentle man taught the boy and girl the great aim of education—to know; to educate themselves; to have self-reliance; to establish a code of conduct; in a word, to form character. For, he pointed out to them, the good of the community is the highest human aim, and knowledge of this world the only basis on which to build conduct towards that end.
And, the morning’s work done, he would counsel exercise, taking them himself sometimes to Booksellers’ Row, walking beside them, with the great black cloak and theatrical strut, striking a little out of their way towards Soho, before they swung round into the Strand, to drag out Netherby to their frolics; and the four of them, making down their beloved Strand, would haunt the Row by hours, poring over the stalls of the second-hand booksellers, garnering their rare pennies to thrilling purchases in the glorious dingy dusty narrow old picturesque alley of splendid treasure.
Indeed, Netherby Gomme did not lack bodily exercise in these days, for the boy and girl considered no junket complete without him. So Noll and Betty and he would go for walks to Chiswick, down the river to Hampton Court, stroll the Strand and gaze into the print-shops that lay thereabout, loiter on Westminster Bridge and wander in the Abbey; haunt the picture-galleries and live in the pits of theatres, getting passes at times from the kindly bohemians to dress circles—and sometimes Julia would come, her long day’s work being done.