in Cowper,
instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work. His observations
on public schools were not uninteresting, but the whole English school-
work of those days was repugnant. One's English education was all got
out of school.

As to Greek, for years it seemed a mere vacuous terror; one invented for
one's self all the current arguments against "compulsory Greek." What
was the use of it, who ever spoke in it, who could find any sense in it,
or any interest? A language with such cruel superfluities as a middle
voice and a dual; a language whose verbs were so fantastically irregular,
looked like a barbaric survival, a mere plague and torment. So one
thought till Homer was opened before us. Elsewhere I have tried to
describe the vivid delight of first reading Homer, delight, by the way,
which St. Augustine failed to appreciate. Most boys not wholly immersed
in dulness felt it, I think; to myself, for one, Homer was the real
beginning of study. One had tried him, when one was very young, in Pope,
and had been baffled by Pope, and his artificial manner, his "fairs," and
"swains." Homer seemed better reading in the absurd "crib" which Mr.
Buckley wrote for Bohn's series. Hector and Ajax, in that disguise, were
as great favourites as Horatius on the Bridge, or the younger Tarquin.
Scott, by the way, must have made one a furious and consistent
Legitimist. In reading the "Lays of Ancient Rome," my sympathies were
with the expelled kings, at least with him who fought so well at Lake
Regillus:--

"Titus, the youngest Tarquin,
Too good for such a breed."

Where--

"Valerius struck at Titus,
And lopped off half his crest;
But Titus stabbed Valerius
A span deep in the breast,"--

I find, on the margin of my old copy, in a schoolboy's hand, the words
"Well done, the Jacobites!" Perhaps my politics have never gone much
beyond this sentiment. But this is a digression from Homer. The very
sound of the hexameter, that long, inimitable roll of the most various
music, was enough to win the heart, even if the words were not
understood. But the words proved unexpectedly easy to understand, full
as they are of all nobility, all tenderness, all courage, courtesy, and
romance. The "Morte d'Arthur" itself, which about this time fell into
our hands, was not so dear as the "Odyssey," though for a boy to read Sir
Thomas Malory is to ride at adventure in enchanted forests, to enter
haun