es? I was worst of all at literature, for we read Shakespeare for his
grammar exclusively.

One day I had a lucky thought. A great many lessons were run through in
the last hour of the day, things we had learnt or should have learnt by
heart over night, and after not having known one of them for weeks, I cut
off that hour without anybody's leave. I asked the mathematical master to
give me a sum to work and nobody said a word. My father often interfered,
and always with disaster, to teach me my Latin lesson. "But I have also my
geography," I would say. "Geography," he would reply, "should never be
taught. It is not a training for the mind. You will pick up all that you
need, in your general reading." And if it was a history lesson, he would
say just the same, and "Euclid," he would say, "is too easy. It comes
naturally to the literary imagination. The old idea, that it is a good
training for the mind, was long ago refuted." I would know my Latin lesson
so that it was a nine days' wonder, and for weeks after would be told it
was scandalous to be so clever and so idle. No one knew that I had learnt
it in the terror that alone could check my wandering mind. I must have
told on him at some time or other for I remember the head-master saying,
"I am going to give you an imposition because I cannot get at your father
to give him one." Sometimes we had essays to write; & though I never got a
prize, for the essays were judged by hand-writing and spelling I caused a
measure of scandal. I would be called up before some master and asked if I
really believed such things, and that would make me angry for I had
written what I had believed all my life, what my father had told me, or a
memory of the conversation of his friends. There were other beliefs, but
they were held by people one did not know, people who were vulgar or
stupid. I was asked to write an essay on "men may rise on stepping-stones
of their dead selves to higher things." My father read the subject to my
mother, who had no interest in such matters. "That is the way," he said,
"boys are made insincere and false to themselves. Ideals make the blood
thin, and take the human nature out of people." He walked up and down the
room in eloquent indignation, and told me not to write on such a subject
at all, but upon Shakespeare's lines "to thine own self be true, and it
must follow as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man."
At another time, he would denounce the i