had of the look of a Greek knight was
complicated between recollection of a small engraving in my pocket
Pope's Homer, and reverent study of the Horse Guards. And though I
believe that most boys collect their ideas from more varied sources and
arrange them more carefully than I did; still, whatever sources they
seek must always be ocular: if they are clever boys, they will go and
look at the Greek vases and sculptures in the British Museum, and at the
weapons in our armouries--they will see what real armour is like in
lustre, and what Greek armour was like in form, and so put a fairly true
image together, but still not, in ordinary cases, a very living or
interesting one.

107. Now, the use of your decorative painting would be, in myriads of
ways, to animate their history for them, and to put the living aspect of
past things before their eyes as faithfully as intelligent invention
can; so that the master shall have nothing to do but once to point to
the schoolroom walls, and for ever afterwards the meaning of any word
would be fixed in a boy's mind in the best possible way. Is it a
question of classical dress--what a tunic was like, or a chlamys, or a
peplus? At this day, you have to point to some vile woodcut, in the
middle of a dictionary page, representing the thing hung upon a stick;
but then, you would point to a hundred figures, wearing the actual
dress, in its fiery colours, in all actions of various stateliness or
strength; you would understand at once how it fell round the people's
limbs as they stood, how it drifted from their shoulders as they went,
how it veiled their faces as they wept, how it covered their heads in
the day of battle. _Now_, if you want to see what a weapon is like, you
refer, in like manner, to a numbered page, in which there are
spear-heads in rows, and sword-hilts in symmetrical groups; and
gradually the boy gets a dim mathematical notion how one scimitar is
hooked to the right and another to the left, and one javelin has a knob
to it and another none: while one glance at your good picture would show
him,--and the first rainy afternoon in the schoolroom would for ever fix
in his mind,--the look of the sword and spear as they fell or flew; and
how they pierced, or bent, or shattered--how men wielded them, and how
men died by them.

108. But far more than all this, is it a question not of clothes or
weapons, but of men? how can we sufficiently estimate the effect on the
mind of a no