This sound appreciation of what was best in classical literature was accompanied in Sydney Smith by the most outspoken contempt for the way in which Greek and Latin are taught in Public Schools.  He thought that schoolmasters encouraged their pupils to “love the instrument better than the end—­not the luxury which the difficulty encloses, but the difficulty—­not the filbert, but the shell—­not what may be read in Greek, but Greek itself?”

“We think that, in order to secure an attention to Homer and Virgil, we must catch up every man, whether he is to be a clergyman or a duke, begin with him at six years of age, and never quit him till he is twenty; making him conjugate and decline for life and death; and so teaching him to estimate his progress in real wisdom as he can scan the verses of the Greek Tragedians.”

He desired that boys should obtain a quick and easy mastery over the authors whom they had to read, and on this account he urged that they should be taught by the use of literal and interlinear translations; but “a literal translation, or any translation, of a school-book is a contraband article in English schools, which a schoolmaster would instantly seize, as a custom-house officer would seize a barrel of gin.”

Grammar, gerund-grinding, the tyranny of the Lexicon and the Dictionary, had got the schoolboys of England in their grasp, and the boy “was suffocated with the nonsense of grammarians, overwhelmed with every species of difficulty disproportionate to his age, and driven by despair to pegtop or marbles”; while the British Parent stood and spoke thus with himself:—­

“Have I read through Lilly?  Have I learnt by heart that most atrocious monument of absurdity, the Westminster Grammar?  Have I been whipt for the substantives? whipt for the verbs? and whipt for and with the interjections?  Have I picked the sense slowly, and word by word, out of Hederich? and shall my son be exempt from all this misery?...  Ay, ay, it’s all mighty well; but I went through this myself, and I am determined my children shall do the same.”

Another grotesque abuse with regard to which Sydney Smith was a reformer fifty years before his time was compulsory versification.—­

“There are few boys who remain to the age of eighteen or nineteen at a Public School without making above ten thousand Latin verses—­a greater number than is contained in the Aeneid; and, after he has made this quantity of verses in a dead language, unless the poet should happen to be a very weak man indeed, he never makes another as long as he lives."[4]

“The English clergy, in whose hands education entirely rests, bring up the first young men of the country as if they were all to keep grammar-schools in little country-towns; and a nobleman, upon whose knowledge and liberality the honour and welfare of his country may depend, is diligently worried, for half his life, with the