or thirty boys brought two
or three frogs, and when the experiment was to be made all these frogs
were hopping about the lecture-room, and the whole army of boys were
hopping after them over chairs and tables to catch them. No wonder
that during this tumult the master did not succeed with his
experiment, and when at last the glass bowl was lifted up and we were
asked to see the frog, great was the joy of all the boys when the frog
hopped out and escaped from the hands of its executioner. Such was the
wrath excited by these new-fangled lectures among the boys that they
actually committed the vandalism of using one of the forms as a
battering-ram against the enclosure in which the physical science
apparatus was kept, and destroyed some of the precious instruments
supplied by Government. Severe punishments followed, but they did not
serve to make physical science more popular.

We certainly did very well in Greek and Latin, and read a number of
classical texts, not only critically at school, but also cursorily at
home, having to give a weekly account of what we had thus read by
ourselves. I liked my classics, and yet I could not help feeling that
there was a certain exaggeration in the way in which every one of
them was spoken of by our teachers, nay, that as compared to German
poets and prose writers they were somewhat overpraised. Still, it
would have been very conceited not to admire what our masters admired,
and as in duty bound we went into the usual raptures about Homer and
Sophocles, about Horace and Cicero. Many things which in later life we
learn to admire in the classics could hardly appeal to the taste of
boys. The directness, the simplicity and originality of the ancient,
as compared with modern writers, cannot be appreciated by them, and I
well remember being struck with what we disrespectful boys called the
cheekiness of Horace expecting immortality (_non omnis moriar_) for
little poems which we were told were chiefly written after Greek
patterns. We had to admit that there were fewer false quantities in
his Latin verses than in our own, but in other respects we could not
see that his odes were so infinitely superior to ours. His hope of
immortality has certainly been fulfilled beyond what could have been
his own expectations. With so little of ancient history known to him,
his idea of the immortality of poetry must have been far more modest
in his time than in our own. He may have known the past glories of