What strikes me as so strange in reading, and agreeing
with, Lord Berners's book is that so few masters in my experience ever seemed to realise that the main profit and enjoyment which we could derive from a study of Greek and Latin was a specifically literary, as distinct from grammatical, pleasure. Even Homer, if you construe him word by word, becomes as dull as ditch ; no sane man or woman; unless they read it with the greatest speed, can hope to derive any- thing but lassitude from a perusal of Demosthenes's De Corona : and I defy any normal boy to extract anything but utter bewilder- ment from the choruses of Aeschylus. How strange it seems, to me that my masters did not, while I was still struggling with the difficulties of the syntax, provide me with those passages or texts which, from their romantic or urbane nature, would have conveyed some sort of meaning to my immature mind. A boy can understand the opening scenes of the Agamemnon or the last scenes of the Odyssey, since they tell a tale of action ; he can understand Cicero's letters ; but he cannot face the choruses of the Prometheus without succumbing to unutterable boredom. The impression I derive -on looking back across the gulf of years is identical with Lord Berners's own impression, namely, that my masters themselves loathed the classic tongues. It is distressing to me now to realise that if I had manifested at the nets or on the football field anything approach- ing the interest or the capacity which I must certainly at least have indicated in my studies of Greek and Latin, there would have been many tutors and masters who would have rushed delightedly to my assistance. But since such propensity as I displayed was concerned with " work " rather than "games," the masters ignored me as being pretentious and somewhat odd.
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