hould not be troubled either."

It must be confessed that people were very inconsiderate. Rows of
tourists sat like sparrows on the paling of his garden, waiting for
his appearance. The guides were actually paid by sight-seers,
particularly by those from America, for showing them the great poet.
Nay, they went so far as to dress up a sailor to look like Tennyson,
and the result was that, after their trick had been found out, the
tourists would walk up to Tennyson and ask him, "Now, are you the real
Tennyson?" This, no doubt, was very annoying, and later on Lord
Tennyson was driven to pay a large sum for some useless downs near his
house, simply in order to escape from the attentions of admiring
travelers.

XXXIII

THE EARLY EDUCATION OF JOHN STUART MILL

At an age when most children are playing with a Noah's Ark or a doll,
John Stuart Mill was initiated into the mysteries of the Greek
language. "I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn
Greek," writes Mill, "I have been told that it was when I was three
years old." Latin was not begun until his eighth year. By that time he
had read in Greek,--AEsop, the Anabasis, the whole of Herodotus, the
Cyropaedia, the Memorabilia, parts of Diogenes Laertius, and of Lucian,
Isocrates; also six dialogues of Plato. An equipment like this
suggests the satiric lines of Hudibras:

Besides, 'tis known he could speak Greek
As naturally as pigs squeak.

In considering the difficulties that this child--shall we say
babe?--had to overcome one must remember that the aids to learning
Greek were not then what they are now. In 1820 the Greek lexicon was a
ponderous thing, almost as big and heavy as the infant student
himself. Worse than this, the definitions were not in English, but in
Greek and Latin, and as the boy had not yet learned Latin he had to
ask his father for the meaning of every new word. The immense task
placed thus upon the child makes one feel indignant and wish that some
organization for the prevention of cruelty to infants had interfered
with the ambition of the learned father. But we must admire the
patience of the father, however we may question his good sense. "What
he himself was willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction,"
says the son in describing his father's teaching, "may be judged from
the fact, that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek
lessons in the same room and at the same table at which he was
writin