of
schoolmasters, see Juv, _Sat_. vii.]

The things taught were chiefly arithmetic, grammar--both Greek and
Latin--reading, and repetition of the chief Latin poets. There was also
a good deal of recitation and of theme-writing on all kinds of trite
historical subjects. The arithmetic seems to have been mainly of a very
simple and severely practical kind, especially the computation of
interest and compound interest; and the philology generally, both
grammar and criticism, was singularly narrow, uninteresting, and
useless. Of what conceivable advantage can it have been to any human
being to know the name of the mother of Hecuba, of the nurse of
Anchises, of the stepmother of Anchemolus, the number of years Acestes
lived, and how many casks of wine the Sicilians gave to the Phrygians?
Yet these were the dispicable _minutiae_ which every schoolmaster was
then expected to have at his fingers' ends, and every boy-scholar to
learn at the point of the ferule--trash which was only fit to be
unlearned the moment it was known.

For this kind of verbal criticism and fantastic archaeology Seneca, who
had probably gone through it all, expresses a profound and very rational
contempt. In a rather amusing passage[6] he contrasts the kind of use
which would be made of a Virgil lesson by a philosopher and a
grammarian. Coming to the lines,

"Each happiest day for mortals speeds the first,
Then crowds disease behind and age accurst,"

the philosopher will point out why and in what sense the early days of
life are the best days, and how rapidly the evil days succeed them, and
consequently how infinitely important it is to use well the golden dawn
of our being. But the verbal critic will content himself with the
remark that Virgil always uses _fugio_ of the flight of time, and
always joins "old age" with "disease," and consequently that these are
tags to be remembered, and plagiarized hereafter in the pupils'
"_original_ composition." Similarly, if the book in hand be Cicero's
treatise "On the Commonwealth," instead of entering into great political
questions, our grammarian will note that one of the Roman kings had no
father (to speak of), and another no mother; that dictators used
formerly to be called "masters of the people;" that Romulus perished
during an eclipse; that the old form of _reipsa_ was _reapse_, and of
_se ipse_ was _sepse_; that the starting point in the circus which is
now called _creta_, or "chalk," used t