This good lady, whose name by the way was Bromfield, had a fine high
temper of her own, or thought it politic to affect one. 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 ramp-
ingest-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
text]. 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. That we will not be at the trouble of
looking at things for ourselves if we can get any one to tell us
what we ought to see goes without saying, and it is the business of
schools and universities to assist us in this respect.
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