Is not a page of Thucydides simpler?  Is Persius himself more succinct or obscure?  Our teachers used to apologise for teaching us Latin grammar and mathematics by telling us that they were good mental gymnastics.  If education is only a matter of mental gymnastics, however, I should recommend horse-racing as an ideal study for young boys and girls.  The sole objection to it is that it is so engrossing; it might absorb the whole energies of the child.  The safety of Latin grammar lies in its dullness.  No child is tempted by it into forgetting that there are other duties in life besides mental gymnastics.  Horse-racing, on the other hand, comes into our lives with the effect of a religious conversion.  It is the greatest monopolist among the pleasures.  It affects men’s conversation.  It affects their entire outlook.  The betting man’s is a dedicated life.  Even books have a new meaning for him. The Ring and the Book—­it is his one and only epic.  And it is the most intellectual of epics.  That is my point.

X

WHY WE HATE INSECTS

It has been said that the characteristic sound of summer is the hum of insects, as the characteristic sound of spring is the singing of birds.  It is all the more curious that the word “insect” conveys to us an implication of ugliness.  We think of spiders, of which many people are more afraid than of Germans.  We think of bugs and fleas, which seem so indecent in their lives that they are made a jest by the vulgar and the nice people do their best to avoid mentioning them.  We think of blackbeetles scurrying into safety as the kitchen light is suddenly turned on—­blackbeetles which (so we are told) in the first place are not beetles, and in the second place are not black.  There are some women who will make a face at the mere name of any of these creatures.  Those of us who have never felt this repulsion—­at least, against spiders and blackbeetles—­cannot but wonder how far it is natural.  Is it born in certain people, or is it acquired like the old-fashioned habit of swooning and the fear of mice?  The nearest I have come to it is a feeling of disgust when I have seen a cat retrieving a blackbeetle just about to escape under a wall and making a dish of it.  There are also certain crawling creatures which are so notoriously the children of filth and so threatening in their touch that we naturally shrink from them.  Burns may make merry over a louse crawling in a lady’s hair, but few of us can regard its kind with equanimity even on the backs of swine.  Men of science deny that the louse is actually engendered by dirt, but it undoubtedly thrives on it.  Our anger against the flea also arises from the fact that we associate it with dirt.  Donne once wrote a poem to a lady who had been bitten by the same flea as himself, arguing that this was a good reason why she should allow him to make love to her.  It is, and was bound to