gion,
And often are faint on the march."

One by one they fall out of the ranks; they mutiny against Xenophon; they
murmur against that commander; they desert his flag. They determine that
anything is better than Greek, that nothing can be worse than Greek, and
they move the tender hearts of their parents. They are put to learn
German; which they do not learn, unluckily, but which they find it
comparatively easy to shirk. In brief, they leave school without having
learned anything whatever.

Up to a certain age my experiences at school were precisely those which I
have described. Our grammar was not so philological, abstruse and arid
as the instruments of torture employed at present. But I hated Greek
with a deadly and sickening hatred; I hated it like a bully and a thief
of time. The verbs in [Greek text] completed my intellectual
discomfiture, and Xenophon routed me with horrible carnage. I could have
run away to sea, but for a strong impression that a life on the ocean
wave "did not set my genius," as Alan Breck says. Then we began to read
Homer; and from the very first words, in which the Muse is asked to sing
the wrath of Achilles, Peleus' son, my mind was altered, and I was the
devoted friend of Greek. Here was something worth reading about; here
one knew where one was; here was the music of words, here were poetry,
pleasure, and life. We fortunately had a teacher (Dr. Hodson) who was
not wildly enthusiastic about grammar. He would set us long pieces of
the Iliad or Odyssey to learn, and, when the day's task was done, would
make us read on, adventuring ourselves in "the unseen," and construing as
gallantly as we might, without grammar or dictionary. On the following
day we surveyed more carefully the ground we had pioneered or skirmished
over, and then advanced again. Thus, to change the metaphor, we took
Homer in large draughts, not in sips: in sips no epic can be enjoyed. We
now revelled in Homer like Keats in Spenser, like young horses let loose
in a pasture. The result was not the making of many accurate scholars,
though a few were made; others got nothing better than enjoyment in their
work, and the firm belief, opposed to that of most schoolboys, that the
ancients did not write nonsense. To love Homer, as Steele said about
loving a fair lady of quality, "is a liberal education."

Judging from this example, I venture very humbly to think that any one
who, even at the age of Cato, wants