Yet, in an irrational mood, I would read—I would frequently steal off to some quiet spot in the neighbourhood, and employ myself in various histories, of which reading I was always very fond. My favourite retreat was up in an old pollarded willow-tree, secure from fagging, and therefore enjoying the distant voices in the playing-fields, delightfully contrasting with the quiet splash of the trout leaping in the river beneath me.
Thus I obtained a respectably accurate knowledge of the Roman, Grecian, and English histories, and a somewhat precocious insight too of the characters of their various and prominent actors.
As for the heroes of the fabulous ages, I was completely conversant with each of their circumstances, and for this reason. I must acknowledge, that, as the hour approached for punishment, I was apt to be troubled in mind, similarly to a patient about to undergo a disagreeable operation; but no sooner had I opened Lempriere's classical dictionary, than every unpleasing anticipation was dissolved, and I became totally unconscious of vulgar realities, and absorbed in its poetical but unequivocal immorality.
CHAPTER VI.[ToC]
In spite of the ingenuity I expended, in order to imbibe as small a quantity of Latin and Greek as was possible, and of the number of persons, whom I have so frequently heard declaiming against the exclusive attention paid to their attainment, and with whom, during my pupillage, I entirely coincided, I cannot help smiling at the extent to which I have since ratted in this respect. Now that I am no longer forced to profit by such studies, I have arrived at the conviction of their necessity. If a knowledge of our own language be desirable, they afford the only means of understanding the true import of the words which constitute it; and when, at times, I have sufficient diffidence to suspect my own capabilities of forming a correct opinion in the matter, and examine into that of others, I have to acknowledge, not only that the advocates of the dead languages are the most competent judges, but that the persons who oppose them the most strenuously, are invariably those who are the least conversant with them; while the former, again, are rarely heard to regret the time expended in their acquirements; while what superior though uneducated man, but has deplored his ignorance of them, and his want of opportunity to acquire them?
But I have, of late, arrived at such an extreme as to advocate the study to the exclusion of all others, with the exception of modern languages. My paradox is this, that which is downright indispensable for everyday life, do not teach us; for then, in spite of ourselves, we must, in these subjects, become our own instructors. If, in a few years after we have left the school, we possess not a respectable knowledge of such common, and easily acquired subjects, as arithmetic, history, and geography, we alone are culpable; and the more the world makes us sensible of our deficiency, the more we deserve it, and the sooner we shall set about to apply the remedy. Teach us, then, in boyhood, that which we will not, or in this case, perhaps, cannot teach ourselves—a knowledge of the classics.
I sometimes suspect that many persons doubt of their importance, from the fact of their being distinguished as the dead languages, while, perhaps, they are exactly the only immortal ones—unchangeable throughout all ages in their primitive purity. In an unwary, or perhaps charitable moment, I am seized with enthusiastic admiration of our forefathers' good taste in so justly appreciating the beauties of ancient literature, though I now and then have a misgiving that it is a relic of the cloister, which had no productions of its own to compete with them, and its traditional authority has not yet become extinct; not that the moderns have produced such works of genius as to supersede them, for those of the imagination are not to be accumulated to greater perfection, from age to age, like those of science. Indeed the works of the ancients, relative to the latter, are now only useful as instances of the progress of the human mind; nor could they be otherwise, as science is more or less perfect in proportion to the ages that have preceded; as it is the last man's knowledge, added to that of all his predecessors, or, as Sir John Herschel far better expresses it, it "is the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and arranged, so as to become attainable by one;" and thus a respectable philosopher of the present day may possess more knowledge than even such powerful and original minds as those of Confucius or Zoroaster, Aristotle or Pythagoras: he is not like the goose I now see wading through the mud, and that can't build its nest a jot better than the sacred ones of the Capitol could.