48 ON CLASSIC POETRY. As an apology for this admitted defect, and in justification of the contempt put upon classic allusions, the noble author makes these observations : "I wish to express, that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote, before we can get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed, by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of compositions which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish, or to reason upon. For the same reason, we never can be aware of the fulness of some of the finest passages of Shakspeare, ('To be, or not to be,' for instance,) from the habit of having them hammered into us at eight years old, as an exercise, not of mind, but of memory; so that when we are old enough to enjoy them, the taste is gone, and the appetite palled. In some parts of the Continent young persons are taught from more common authors, and do not read the best classics till their maturity. I certainly do not speak on this point from any pique or aversion towards the place of my education. I ON CLASSIC POETRY. 49 was not a slow, though an idle boy; and I believe no one could be more attached to Harrow than I have always been, and with reason:-a part of the time passed there was the happiest of my life; and my preceptor (the Reverend Dr. Joseph Drury) was the best and worthiest friend I ever possessed, whose warnings I have remembered but too well, though too late, when I have erred; and whose counsels I have but followed when I have done well and wisely. If ever this imperfect record of my feelings towards him should reach his eyes, let it remind him of one who never thinks of him but with gratitude and veneration, ―of one who would more gladly boast of having been his pupil, if by more closely following his injunctions he could reflect any honour upon his instructor." Pleasing as this tribute of gratitude is, it would have been more so had the noble author forborne to satirize in the coarsest strain of rude invective, by the appellation of Pomposus, the head master of the same seminary, for no other cause in the world than that of having enforced, without any relaxation in favour of individuals, the statutes of the house over which he presided. E 50 PUBLIC EDUCATION. But it is the sweeping censure passed upon the system of instruction adopted in all our grammarschools that calls for particular notice and animadversion. If the attainment of Latin and Greek is at all necessary, it is obvious that those languages cannot be acquired in perfection, but through the medium of the finest writers, as well in verse as in prose. What the late Dean Vincent has observed on this subject in his admirable "Defence of Public Education," is so decisive of the question that it is only to be regretted that the author of Childe Harold should have been ignorant of a tract, the perusal of which would have saved him from falling under the keen remark, that "he who writes with the Goths, cannot thoroughly feel with the Classics." Having remarked that Milton, Cowley, and Addison had distinguished themselves by their paradoxical opinions in regard to education, Dr. Vincent takes their reflections in order. "MILTON," says he, "complained of the years that were wasted in teaching the dead languages, and PUBLIC EDUCATION. 51 proposed a more compendious method of his own; but Johnson, who had taught these languages himself, observes that no man can teach faster than a boy can learn. We know nothing of Milton's success; for not a name of all his pupils is upon record: but we know what the brightest luminaries of the age issued from the school of Busby; and we know that to form the habits of literature, time is required as well as teaching. "COWLEY complained that classical education taught words only, and not things; but it ought to be considered that all the instruction of childhood de pends more on memory than intellect. When the age of comprehension comes, from twelve or fourteen to sixteen or eighteen, if the master teaches only words, he is a blockhead. It is the composition of the poet he is to notice, and not the rendering a word of the original by its correspondent term in English; the order, connexion, and relation of part to part, the allusions to history, mythology, and geography; and if these are not things rather than words, where are we to search for them? 52 INVOCATION TO HARROW. "ADDISON deemed it an inexpiable error, that boys, with genius or without, were all to be bred poet indiscriminately; and if this were our object in teaching prosody, his reproof would be just; but no ear can be formed to harmony, no poet can be read with pleasure, no intimate acquaintance with any dead language can be obtained, without a knowledge of prosody." While Lord Byron was at school, one of the living ornaments of that seminary printed, though he did not publish, "An Invocation to the Harrow Muses, to defend the use of the Heathen Mythology, in Poetry." Whether the author of Childe Harold had this poem in his eye when he spoke so contemptuously of "Latian echoes," is a question which cannot be discussed in this place; but the reader of sensibility, it is apprehended, will not be displeased with some lines from a performance conceived in the genuine strain of classic taste and genuine poesy: "I will not from remembrance blot the lays |