--
"There are few boys who remain to the age of eighteen or nineteen at a
Public School without making above ten thousand Latin verses--a
greater number than is contained in the _Aeneid_; and, after he
has made this quantity of verses in a dead language, unless the poet
should happen to be a very weak man indeed, he never makes another as
long as he lives."[4]
"The English clergy, in whose hands education entirely rests, bring up
the first young men of the country as if they were all to keep
grammar-schools in little country-towns; and a nobleman, upon whose
knowledge and liberality the honour and welfare of his country may
depend, is diligently worried, for half his life, with the small
pedantry of longs and shorts."
The same process is applied at the other end of the social scale. The
baker's son, young Crumpet, is sent to a grammar-school, "takes to his
books, spends the best years of his life, as all eminent Englishmen do, in
making Latin verses, learns that the _Crum_ in Crumpet is long and the
_pet_ short, goes to the University, gets a prize for an essay on the
Dispersion of the Jews, takes Orders, becomes a Bishop's chaplain, has a
young nobleman for his pupil, publishes a useless classic and a Serious
Call to the Unconverted, and then goes through the Elysian transitions of
Prebendary, Dean, Prelate, and the long train of purple, profit, and
power.
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