My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

MY SCHOOL LIFE AT HERTFORD 29Mr. Crutwell was, I suppose, a fairly good classicalscholar, as he took the higher classes in Latin andGreek. I left school too young even to begin Greek,but the last year or two I was in the Latin classwhich was going through Virgil's "^neid" with him.The system was very bad. The eight or ten boys inthe class had an hour to prepare the translation, andthey all sat together in a group opposite each otherand close to Mr. Crutwell's desk, but under pretenceof work there were always two or three of the boyswho were full of talk and gossip and school stories,which kept us all employed and amused till withinabout a quarter of an hour of the time for being calledup, when some one would remark, " I say, let's do ourtranslation ; I don't know a word of it." Then thecleverest boy, or one who had already been throughthe book, would begin to translate, two or three otherswould have their dictionaries ready when he did notknow the meaning of a word, and so we blunderedthrough our forty or fifty lines.When we were calledup, it was all a matter of chance whether we gotthrough well or otherwise. If the master was in agood humour and the part we had to translate wasspecially interesting, he would help us on wheneverwe hesitated or blundered, and when we had gotthrough the lesson, he would make a few remarks onthe subject, and say, " Now I will read you the wholeincident." He would then take out a translation ofthe " iEneid " in verse by a relative of his own—anuncle, I think—and, beginning perhaps a page or twoback, read usseveral pages, so that we could betterappreciate what we had been trying to translate. I,for one, always enjoyed these readings, as the versewas clear and melodious, and gave an excellent ideaof the poetry of the Latin writer. Sometimes our