Excerpt from Estimations in Criticism, Vol. 2 of 2: Prose-Writers

A more sudden effect was at hand. However exalted may seem the praises which we have given to loose and unplanned reading, we are not saying that it is the sole ingredient of a good education. Besides this sort of education, which some boys will voluntarily and naturally give themselves, there needs, of course, another and more rigorous kind, which must be impressed upon them from without. The terrible difficulty of early life - the use of pastors and masters - really is, that they compel boys to a distinct mastery of that which they do not wish to learn. There is nothing to be said for a preceptor who is not dry. Mr. Carlyle describes with bitter satire the fate of one of his heroes who was obliged to acquire whole systems of information in which he, the hero, saw no use, and which he kept as far as might be in a vacant corner of his mind. And this is the very point - dry language, tedious mathe matics, a thumbed grammar, a detested slate, form gradually an interior separate intellect, exact in its information, rigid in its requirements, disciplined in its exercises. The two grow together, the early natural fancy touching the far extremities of the universe, lightly playing with the scheme of all things the precise, compacted memory slowly accumulating special facts, exact habits, clear and painful con ceptions. At last, as it were in a moment, the cloud breaks up, the division sweeps away; we find that in fact these exercises which puzzled us these languages which we hated, these details whicl we despised, are the instruments of true thought are the very keys and openings, the exclusive acces. To the knowledge which we loved.

In this second education the childhood of Gibbon had been very defective. He had never been placed under any rigid training. In his first boyhood he had disputed with his aunt, that were I master of Greek and Latin, I must interpret to myself in English the thoughts of the original, and that such extemporary versions must be inferior to the elaborate translation of professed scholars: a silly sophism, ' as he remarks, which could not easily be confuted by a person ignorant of any other language than her own.' Ill-health, a not very wise father, an ill chosen succession of schools and pedagogues, pre vented his acquiring exact knowledge in the regular. Subjects of study. His own description is the best erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and ignorance of which a schoolboy should have been ashamed.' The amiable Mr. Francis, who was to have repaired the deficiency, went to London, and forgot him. With an impulse of discontent his father took a resolution, and sent him to Oxford at sixteen.

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