2d Year:
Latin Reader continued
Turner’s Exercises
Cornelius Nepos
Irving’s Grecian and Roman Histories
Roman Antiquities
3d Year:
Cæsar, Ovid, Latin Prosody
Turner’s Exercises, Translations
Irving’s Grecian Antiquities
Mythology and Biography
Greek Grammar
J. E. A. Smith, in the Biographical Sketch of Herman Melville that in 1891 he wrote for The Evening Journal of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, says of Melville’s school-days:
“In 1835, Professor Charles E. West ... was president of the Albany Classical Institute for boys, and Herman Melville became one of his pupils. Professor West now remembers him as a favourite pupil, not distinguished for mathematics, but very much so in the writing of ‘themes’ or ‘compositions’ and fond of doing it, while the great majority of pupils dreaded it as a task, and would shirk it if they could.”
In 1835, Melville was clerk in his brother’s shop. If J. E. A. Smith’s record is accurate, Melville was at the time alternating business with education.
The greater part of 1836 was spent by Melville, according to his own account, already quoted, in the household of his uncle Major Thomas Melville, at Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
J. E. A. Smith in his Biographical Sketch so supplements Melville’s account: “Besides his labours with his uncle in the hay field, he was for one term teacher of the common school in the ‘Sykes district’ under Washington mountain, of which he had some racy memories—one of them of a rebellion in which some of the bigger boys undertook to ‘lick’ him—with what results, those who remember his physique and character can well imagine.”