Wolfe's dreary garrison leisures in Scotland, however, were not idle. His books go with him, and he is doing his best to cultivate himself, both professionally and generally. He afterwards recommends to a friend, evidently from his own experience, a long list of military histories and other works ancient and modern. The ancients he read in translations. His range is wide and he appreciates military genius in all its forms. "There is an abundance of military knowledge to be picked out of the lives of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII., King of Sweden, and of Zisca the Bohemian, and if a tolerable account could be got of the exploits of Scanderbeg, it would be inestimable, for he excels all the officers ancient and modern in the conduct of a small defensive army." At Louisburg, Wolfe put in practice, with good effect, a manoeuvre which he had learned from the Carduchi in Xenophon, showing perhaps by this reproduction of the tactics employed two thousand years before by a barbarous tribe, that in the so-called art of war there is a large element which is not progressive. Books will never make a soldier, but Wolfe, as a military student, had the advantage of actual experience of war. Whenever he could find a teacher, he studied mathematics, zealously though apparently not with delight. "I have read the mathematics till I am grown perfectly stupid, and have algebraically worked away the little portion of understanding that was allowed to me. They have not even left me the qualities of a coxcomb for I can neither laugh nor sing nor talk an hour upon nothing. The latter of these is a sensible loss, for it excludes a gentleman from all good company and makes him entirely unfit for the conversation of the polite world." "I don't know how the mathematics may assist the judgment, but they have a great tendency to make men dull. I who am far from being sprightly even in my gaiety, am the very reverse of it at this time." Certainly to produce sprightliness is neither the aim nor the general effect of mathematics. That while military education was carried on, general culture was not wholly neglected, is proved by the famous exclamation about Gray's Elegy, the most signal homage perhaps that a poet ever received. At Glasgow, where there is a University, Wolfe studies mathematics in the morning, in the afternoon he endeavours to regain his lost Latin.