THE HISTORY OF THE BELVOIR HUNT 



arduous as possible to the feet of the noble students he had 

 to guide to Parnassus. And underneath all the wiles of the 

 courtly tutor, striving to beguile a not unwilling pupil to 

 lengths he would not reach by himself, we see clearly the 

 unshaken and undoubted faith of the great scholar, that 

 learning was the one thing worth having, and that he had 

 found, as many a less industrious person has done, that it is 

 the most certain and reliable source of pleasure in the world. 

 He feels, however, that he cannot expect a Duke of Rutland 

 either to expend the time or give the attention needed to 

 become a proficient, and he therefore fits his shoulders to the 

 burden of drawing him gently on towards the temple of 

 learning. Nothing puzzles and vexes Maittaire more than 

 the love of the Duke for field sports and for hunting. The 

 scholar was not a self-indulgent or luxurious person, for he 

 was in the habit of spending many hours of each day, during 

 the winter in London, in his library without a fire ; but sport 

 seemed to him a waste of precious time, when life was all too 

 short for the study of accents and enclitics. 



" This man said rather, ' Actual life comes next ? 

 Patience a moment ! 

 Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text, 



Still there's the comment. 

 Let me know all.' "... 



Browning might indeed have had Maittaire in his mind 

 when he wrote the " Grammarian's Funeral." 



Though the scholar was of so different a character to his 

 pupil, the Duke of Rutland, yet he loved him. For it was 

 no slight thing for a man of thirty-two, with the Duke's 

 position, his varied interests and convivial disposition, to 

 turn aside from the claims of his full life to gain know- 

 ledge. Duke John must have loved learning for its own 

 sake, and thus there was a bond of union between him and 

 the man he chose as his tutor. 



Let us turn to the letters of the Maittaire correspondence, 

 and see how they bear out the deductions I have drawn from 

 them. One thing we may be sure that Maittaire would least 

 have expected is that, while we pass over his learned com- 



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