heathen father who approved of “roughing it?” “Being yet a childe, I began to beg Thy ayde and succour; and I did loosen the knots of my tongue in praying Thee; and I begged, being yet a little one, with no little devotion, that I might not be beaten at the schoole.”  One is reminded of Tom Tulliver, who gave up even praying that he might learn one part of his work:  “Please make Mr. —–­ say that I am not to do mathematics.”

The Saint admits that he lacked neither memory nor wit, “but he took delight in playing.”  “The plays and toys of men are called business, yet, when children fall unto them, the same men punish them.”  Yet the schoolmaster was “more fed upon by rage,” if beaten in any little question of learning, than the boy; “if in any match at Ball I had been maistered by one of my playfellows.”  He “aspired proudly to be victorious in the matches which he made,” and I seriously regret to say that he would buy a match, and pay his opponent to lose when he could not win fairly.  He liked romances also, “to have myne eares scratched with lying fables”—­a “lazy, idle boy,” like him who dallied with Rebecca and Rowena in the holidays of Charter House.

Saint Augustine, like Sir Walter Scott at the University of Edinburgh, was “The Greek Dunce.”  Both of these great men, to their sorrow and loss, absolutely and totally declined to learn Greek.  “But what the reason was why I hated the Greeke language, while I was taught it, being a child, I do not yet understand.”  The Saint was far from being alone in that distaste, and he who writes loathed Greek like poison—­till he came to Homer.  Latin the Saint loved, except “when reading, writing, and casting of accounts was taught in Latin, which I held not for lesse paynefull or penal than the very Greeke.  I wept for Dido’s death, who made herselfe away with the sword,” he declares, “and even so, the saying that two and two makes foure was an ungrateful song in mine ears; whereas the wooden horse full of armed men, the burning of Troy, and the very Ghost of Creusa, was a most delightful spectacle of vanity.”

In short, the Saint was a regular Boy—­a high-spirited, clever, sportive, and wilful creature.  He was as fond as most boys of the mythical tales, “and for that I was accounted to be a towardly boy.”  Meanwhile he does not record that Monica disliked his learning the foolish dear old heathen fables—­“that flood of hell!”

Boyhood gave place to youth, and, allowing for the vanity of self-accusation, there can be little doubt that the youth of Saint Augustine was une jeunesse orageuse.  “And what was that wherein I took delight but to love and to be beloved.”  There was ever much sentiment and affection in his amours, but his soul “could not distinguish the beauty of chast love from the muddy darkness of lust.  Streams of them did confusedly boyl in me”—­in his African veins.  “With a restless kind of weariness” he pursued that Other Self of the Platonic dream, neglecting the Love of God: