One night when the boys were particularly noisy she burst like
a hurricane into the hall, collared a youngster, and told him he was
the "rampingest-scampingest-rackety-tackety-tow-row-roaringest boy
in the whole school." Would Mrs. Newton have been able to set the
aunt and the dog before us so vividly if she had been more highly
educated? Would Mrs. Bromfield have been able to forge and hurl her
thunderbolt of a word if she had been taught how to do so, or indeed
been at much pains to create it at all? It came. It was her
[Greek]. She did not probably know that she had done what the
greatest scholar would have had to rack his brains over for many an
hour before he could even approach. Tradition says that having
brought down her boy she looked round the hall in triumph, and then
after a moment's lull said, "Young gentlemen, prayers are excused,"
and left them.
I have sometimes thought that, after all, the main use of a
classical education consists in the check it gives to originality,
and the way in which it prevents an inconvenient number of people
from using their own eyes.
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