admiration of the one than by a desire to spite
and depreciate the other.

Nor is it genius only that thus rebels against the discipline of the
schools. Even the tamer quality of Taste, which it is the professed
object of classical studies to cultivate, is sometimes found to turn
restive under the pedantic _manege_ to which it is subjected. It was
not till released from the duty of reading Virgil as a task, that Gray
could feel himself capable of enjoying the beauties of that poet; and
Lord Byron was, to the last, unable to vanquish a similar
prepossession, with which the same sort of school association had
inoculated him, against Horace.

--"Though Time hath taught
My mind to meditate what then it learn'd,
Yet such the fix'd inveteracy wrought
By the impatience of my early thought,
That, with the freshness wearing out before
My mind could relish what it might have sought,
If free to choose, I cannot now restore
Its health; but what it then detested, still abhor.

"Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so,
Not for thy faults, but mine; it is a curse
To understand, not feel thy lyric flow,
To comprehend, but never love thy verse."

CHILDE HAROLD, CANTO IV

To the list of eminent poets, who have thus left on record their
dislike and disapproval of the English system of education, are to be
added, the distinguished names of Cowley, Addison, and Cowper; while,
among the cases which, like those of Milton and Dryden, practically
demonstrate the sort of inverse ratio that may exist between college
honours and genius, must not be forgotten those of Swift, Goldsmith,
and Churchill, to every one of whom some mark of incompetency was
affixed by the respective universities, whose annals they adorn. When,
in addition, too, to this rather ample catalogue of poets, whom the
universities have sent forth either disloyal or dishonoured, we come
to number over such names as those of Shakspeare and of Pope, followed
by Gay, Thomson, Burns, Chatterton, &c., all of whom have attained
their respective stations of eminence, without instruction or sanction
from any college whatever, it forms altogether, it must be owned, a
large portion of the poetical world, that must be subducted from the
sphere of that nursing influence which the universities are supposed
to exercise over the genius of the country.

The following letters, written at this time, contain some