answering questions
taken from the lesson in standard textbooks, and called out no special
abilities in the students which could distinguish the men of mark from
the merest bookworms. There were men who never read the lesson and
depended on being prompted by a friend. One of these derelicts, the
son of a famous brewer, gave us a laugh which no member of the class
can have forgotten. He was known for drinking enormous quantities of
his father's beer and sleeping even in class; and when the question
put him was, "Who was the reputed inventor of poetry amongst the
Greeks?" he had no answer till the man behind him whispered,
"Orpheus." He caught it badly, and roared, "Morpheus." The laugh that
followed stopped recitation for ten minutes. A laugh in a large class
had a curious way of going on indefinitely.

Until we reached the senior year, and came under the direct care of
the old doctor, there was nothing in the course to awaken special
ambitions. The honors, determined chiefly by the marks given at the
end of the term, being mainly the reward of a diligence rather stupid
than otherwise, as a rule were regarded with great indifference, and,
for the most part, fell to the men who "poled" most assiduously, and
got the best marks for attention, diligence, and correct recitation of
the set tasks. As I look back on the life and work of that period, it
seems to me that it was most unintelligently spent, and when I reached
my senior year, and came under the direct stimulus of Dr. Nott, I
recognized that, so far as the true education was concerned, I had
wasted two years, and had I been master of my future I should have
been inclined to go back to the beginning and repeat the three years'
course of study under the new light, and with a recognition of the
purpose of higher study, for I saw that all that I had gained was
little more than parrot learning. The doctor indeed tried to make us
think, and he used to say that the textbook was a matter of entire
indifference, and that he would as soon have a book of riddles as
Kames's "Elements of Criticism," so long as he could make us think out
our conclusions. With him our recitations were a perpetual contest
of our wits against his; he showed us the shallowness of our
acquisitions, and dissected mercilessly both textbook and the
responses to the questions which he had drawn from it, admitting
nothing and pushing the pupil perpetually into the deeper water as
soon as he began to think h