fe of his own at school and very wilfully taking a line or
lines of his own there. We can now begin to trace the growth of the
mental, and especially the artistic, nature of one of the most
stupendous geniuses the earth has produced. It is altogether
unnecessary to try to piece together anything approaching an elaborate
sketch of the activities and escapades of these days: this would
involve laying violent and liberal hands on the fruits of the labours
of Glasenapp and a dozen other pickers-up of unconsidered trifles,
would yield us nothing essential and might drive the reader to an
untimely end. Out of the strangely tangled skein of truth and obvious
fiction which is called his "life" for this period I shall endeavour
only to pick out such threads of fact as seem to me helpful.

Richard remained five years at the Kreuzschule and took to the
classics with avidity. The best part of his education was classical.
True, he learned enough arithmetic to know how many marks made twenty
and how many francs a louis; but the classics provided him with the
pabulum his growing mind hungered for. His Greek professor took a
special interest in him, which is not surprising when we remember that
at the age of thirteen he translated twelve books of the Odyssey as a
holiday task. Besides this he worked at philology and the ordinary
school curriculum. It is just possible--just, I say--that had the
family remained longer in Dresden he might never have turned to the
Scandinavian sagas at all, but have become an eminent scholar and the
composer of mediocre symphonic music. That, luckily, is one of the
might-have-beens, and we need not mourn over it. Music he was very far
from dropping. He had played a Weber scene while his stepfather was
dying; and he continued to bang away at overtures with such a
fingering, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has said, as of necessity would be
employed by the average worker at a circular-saw. But the great
awakening was not yet. He had first to give the world the mightiest
drama ever conceived by the mind of an energetic, bright,
self-confident boy.

I do not think there is on record a single instance of a great
engineer having manifested artistic preferences in his youth, or of a
great painter having misspent his boyhood in making toy machines.
Always, from the very beginning, the boy unconsciously, without
reflection, instinctively, helplessly, starts away in the direction he
is destined to follow as a man; and though