if he were ever capable of it, he must, by his own
confession, have lost before middle life,[150] though he read it
perfectly to the last. But he is the only modern man whom we know to
have learned Latin as a mother tongue; and this fact was probably just
as important in psychology as was the similar fact, in Shakspere's case,
of his whole adult culture being acquired in his own language. It seems
to me, at least, that there is something significant in the facts: (1)
that the man who most vividly brought the spirit or outcome of classic
culture into touch with the general European intelligence, in the age
when the modern languages first decisively asserted their birthright,
learned his Latin as a living and not as a dead tongue, and knew Greek
literature almost solely by translation; (2) that the dramatist who of
all of his craft has put most of breathing vitality into his pictures of
ancient history, despite endless inaccuracies of detail, read his
authorities only in his own language; and (3) that the English poet who
in our own century has most intensely and delightedly sympathised with
the Greek spirit--I mean Keats--read his Homer only in an English
translation. As regards Montaigne, the full importance of the fact does
not seem to me to have been appreciated by the critics. Villemain,
indeed, who perhaps could best realise it, remarked in his youthful
eloge that the fashion in which the elder Montaigne had his child taught
Latin would bring the boy to the reading of the classics with an eager
interest where others had been already fatigued by the toil of grammar;
but beyond this the peculiarity of the case has not been much
considered. Montaigne, however, gives us details which seem full of
suggestion to scientific educationists. "Without art, without book,
without grammar or precept, without whipping, without tears, I learned a
Latin as pure as my master could give;" and his first exercises were to
turn bad Latin into good.[151] So he read his Ovid's Metamorphoses at
seven or eight, where other forward boys had the native fairy tales; and
a wise teacher led him later through Virgil and Terence and Plautus and
the Italian poets in the same freedom of spirit. Withal, he never
acquired any facility in Greek,[152] and, refusing to play the
apprentice where he was accustomed to be master,[153] he declined to
construe in a difficult tongue; read his Plutarch in Amyot; and his
Plato, doubtless, in the Latin version. It a