As to Greek, for years it seemed a mere vacuous terror; one invented for one’s self all the current arguments against “compulsory Greek.”  What was the use of it, who ever spoke in it, who could find any sense in it, or any interest?  A language with such cruel superfluities as a middle voice and a dual; a language whose verbs were so fantastically irregular, looked like a barbaric survival, a mere plague and torment.  So one thought till Homer was opened before us.  Elsewhere I have tried to describe the vivid delight of first reading Homer, delight, by the way, which St. Augustine failed to appreciate.  Most boys not wholly immersed in dulness felt it, I think; to myself, for one, Homer was the real beginning of study.  One had tried him, when one was very young, in Pope, and had been baffled by Pope, and his artificial manner, his “fairs,” and “swains.”  Homer seemed better reading in the absurd “crib” which Mr. Buckley wrote for Bohn’s series.  Hector and Ajax, in that disguise, were as great favourites as Horatius on the Bridge, or the younger Tarquin.  Scott, by the way, must have made one a furious and consistent Legitimist.  In reading the “Lays of Ancient Rome,” my sympathies were with the expelled kings, at least with him who fought so well at Lake Regillus:—­

   “Titus, the youngest Tarquin,
      Too good for such a breed.”

Where—­

   “Valerius struck at Titus,
      And lopped off half his crest;
   But Titus stabbed Valerius
      A span deep in the breast,”—­

I find, on the margin of my old copy, in a schoolboy’s hand, the words “Well done, the Jacobites!” Perhaps my politics have never gone much beyond this sentiment.  But this is a digression from Homer.  The very sound of the hexameter, that long, inimitable roll of the most various music, was enough to win the heart, even if the words were not understood.  But the words proved unexpectedly easy to understand, full as they are of all nobility, all tenderness, all courage, courtesy, and romance.  The “Morte d’Arthur” itself, which about this time fell into our hands, was not so dear as the “Odyssey,” though for a boy to read Sir Thomas Malory is to ride at adventure in enchanted forests, to enter haunted chapels where a light shines from the Graal, to find by lonely mountain meres the magic boat of Sir Galahad.

After once being initiated into the mysteries of Greece by Homer, the work at Greek was no longer tedious.  Herodotus was a charming and humorous story-teller, and, as for Thucydides, his account of the Sicilian Expedition and its ending was one of the very rare things in literature which almost, if not quite, brought tears into one’s eyes.  Few passages, indeed, have done that, and they are curiously discrepant.  The first book that ever made me cry, of which feat I was horribly ashamed, was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” with the death of Eva, Topsy’s friend.  Then it was trying when Colonel Newcome