Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/367



R. JUSTIN McCARTHY, according to the account with which he has been good enough to favour us, learned very little at school, except the classics and French German and Italian he studied afterwards. He was extremely fond of Latin and Greek, and when quite a small boy used to read even the most difficult Latin and Greek authors quite fluently. He read all the classics he could get hold of when school hours were over. He never had the slightest pretension to scholarship, and only acquired what may be called a literary knowledge of the languages, enough to enable him to read the books he loved. Even still, though he has lost his boyish familiarity with the languages, he has kept up his acquaintance with the great authors of Greece and Rome. He never had any taste for science, except for astronomy, and even that he did not cultivate to any practical extent. At one time he fancied himself a poet, and wrote and published much verse—nearly all of it anonymously. But he became satisfied in his own mind that he had no genuine gift of poetry, and he resolutely gave up any attempts at verse. Born and brought up in a seaport town, he was in his early days passionately fond of yachting, rowing, and swimming—but afterwards he had no leisure to cultivate such pursuits. He entered a lawyer's office immediately after leaving school, and studied law there for about a year. Family affairs compelled him to give up the idea, and he took to newspaper work instead. He became attached to The Cork Examiner when he was hardly more than fifteen years old, and has been connected with journalism ever since. He always says that the one great success of his life has been that he has known so many famous, and gifted, and interesting men and women. He is, and ever has been, a devoted Irish Nationalist, and is well known outside the world of politics as a novelist, and by his "History of Our Own Times."