defective in his Greek grammar.... I ought to have told you
that Richard, when a boy, was a great reader of English poetry; but his
exercises afforded no proof of his proficiency.'

The latter statement speaks volumes for a method of teaching which
failed to evoke, even in such a master of English literature as Sheridan
eventually proved himself to be, a proper development of his greatest
talent. No doubt the exercises in which so little proficiency was shown
were compulsorily executed against the grain, being of such a pedantic
character that no sane schoolboy could possibly be found to evince the
smallest interest in them.

Dean Swift and Sir Walter Scott were both dull boys. The former says of
himself that he was 'stopped of his degree for dulness and
insufficiency.' Scott, in his autobiographical sketch, does not make
himself out to have been the dunce that he really was supposed to be at
school. If not bright at his lessons, however, he was certainly clever
in other ways and capable of thinking for himself. An excellent
illustration of this is contained in the story that though Scott, as a
boy, used invariably to go to sleep in church in the course of the
sermon, yet, when questioned about the latter afterwards, he was
generally able to sketch out most of the points dwelt upon by the
preacher--the explanation being, of course, that, given the text, he was
able to follow the probable train of thought inspired by its wording.
Summing up Scott's attainments, a biographer gives expression to the
opinion that he was 'self-educated in every branch of knowledge he ever
turned to account in the works of his genius.'

Neither Burns nor Carlyle was a scholar. The former received a grounding
in grammar, reading, and writing. He acquired a little French, but
learnt no Latin at all. Whatever he knew he owed to the fact that he
exercised his own taste for knowledge by choosing his own books and
devouring only what appealed to his mind. Carlyle, like many another
famous man of letters, had little Latin and less Greek. 'In the
classical field,' he wrote, 'I am truly as nothing.' For mathematics he
showed a certain amount of inclination, but even in that field did not
succeed in carrying off any prizes. His own opinion of a conventional
education is very tersely rendered by his exclamation: 'Academia! High
School instructors of youth! Oh, ye unspeakable!'

The poet Wordsworth was educated at the grammar school at Hawkshead. He