Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/203

Popular Education son who bluntly confesses that, of the Greek thus pleasantly trifled with, he had "but small understanding," and that the Latin which had been his mother tongue was speedily "corrupted by discontinuance."

All the boy gained by the most elaborate system ever devised for the saving of labour was that he "overskipped" the lower forms in school. What he lost was the habit of mastering his "prescript lessons," which he seems to have disliked as heartily as any student of Guienne. Neither loss nor gain mattered much to a man of original parts. The principal result of his father's scheme was the lingering of certain Latin words among the simple folk of Perigord, who, having painfully acquired these strange terms in order to rescue their little master from his schoolbooks, retained and made use of them all their lives.

An emphatic note of protest against our well-meant but enfeebling 187