or have any foolish observations about the battle of
Waterloo being won on the cricket-field, or such rather unmeaning
oracles, yet succeeded in converting the boys' amusements into a
compulsory gymnastic lesson. The boys are, within reasonable limits,
free.*

[* MS. _History of J.D.C_. written about 1894.]

Gilbert calls the chapter on his school days, "How to be a Dunce,"
and although in mature life he was "on the side of his masters" and
grateful to them "that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were
frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping
the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes," he
still contrasts childhood as a time when one "wants to know nearly
everything" with "the period of what is commonly called education;
that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody
I did not know about something I did not want to know."

The boy who sat next to him in class, Lawrence Solomon (later Senior
Tutor of University College, London), remembered him as sleepy and
indifferent in manner but able to master anything when he cared to
take the trouble--as he very seldom did. He was in a class with boys
almost all his juniors. Lucian Oldershaw, who later became his
brother-in-law, says of Gilbert's own description of his school life
that it was as near a pose as Gilbert ever managed to get. He wanted
desperately to be the ordinary schoolboy, but he never managed to
fulfil this ambition. Tall, untidy, incredibly clumsy and
absent-minded, he was marked out from his fellows both physically and
intellectually. When in the later part of his school life some sort
of physical exercises were made compulsory, the boys used to form
parties to watch his strange efforts on the trapeze or parallel bars.
In these early days, he was (he says of himself) "somewhat solitary,"
but not unhappy, and perfectly good-humoured about the tricks which
were inevitably played on a boy who always appeared to be half asleep.

"He sat at the back of the room," says Mr. Fordham, "and never
distinguished himself. We thought him the most curious thing that
ever was." His schoolfellows noted how he would stride along,
"apparently muttering poetry, breaking into inane laughter." The kind
of thing he was muttering we learn from a sentence in the
_Autobiography:_ "I was one day wandering about the streets in that
part of North Kensington, telling myself stories of feudal sallies
an