HERTFORD: MY SCHOOL LIFE 51 



he took the higher classes in Latin and Greek. I left school 

 too young even to begin Greek, but the last year or two I was 

 in the Latin class which was going through Virgil's "^Eneid " 

 with him. The system was very bad. The eight or ten boys 

 in the class had an hour to prepare the translation, and they 

 all sat together in a group opposite each other and close to 

 Mr. Crutwell's desk, but under pretence of work there were 

 always two or three of the boys who were full of talk and 

 gossip and school stories, which kept us all employed and 

 amused till within about a quarter of an hour of the time for 

 being called up, when some one would remark, " I say, let's 

 do our translation; I don't know a word of it." Then the 

 cleverest boy, or one who had already been through the book, 

 would begin to translate, two or three others would have their 

 dictionaries ready when he did not know the meaning of a 

 word, and so we blundered through our forty or fifty lines. 

 When we were called up, it was all a matter of chance whether 

 we got through well or otherwise. If the master was in a 

 good humour and the part we had to translate was especially 

 interesting, he would help us on whenever we hesitated or 

 blundered, and when we had got through the lesson, he would 

 make a few remarks on the subject, and say, " Now I will read 

 you the whole incident." He would then take out a trans- 

 lation of the " iEneid " in verse by a relative of his own — an 

 uncle, I think — and, beginning perhaps a page or two back, 

 read us several pages, so that we could better appreciate what 

 we had been trying to translate. I, for one, always enjoyed 

 these readings, as the verse was clear and melodious, and 

 gave an excellent idea of the poetry of the Latin writer. 

 Sometimes our laziness and ignorance were found out, and 

 we either had to stay in an hour and go over it again, or copy it 

 out a dozen times, or some other stupid imposition. But as 

 this only occurred now and then, of course it did not in 

 the least affect our general mode of procedure when supposed 

 to be learning our lesson. Mr. Crutwell read well, with a good 

 emphasis and intonation, and I obtained a better idea of what 

 Virgil really was from his readings than from the frag- 

 mentary translations we scrambled through. 



