The head of the school this year was Eustace Miles. We had already been great friends for many terms, and now this friendship ripened into a unique alliance; from morning till night we were together, and seethed in projects, failures and accomplishments. There was no sport or industry in which we were not associated. No matter came up within the jurisdiction of either of us in which each did not consult the other. He was going up for a classical scholarship at King’s, Cambridge, for we had quite settled not to have done with each other when school was over. I had to get to learn some classics somehow, and so together we concocted the most delightful plan, namely, that we should neither of us do any French, mathematics, or history, but should be excused coming into school altogether while such lessons were in progress, devoting ourselves in the privacy of our studies to classics. The headmaster most sensibly saw and sanctioned our point, and consequently we had a whole holiday one day a week, and on two other days only one hour in school. For me that voluntary unsupervised reading, that browsing at will in Attic and Roman pastures, gave me precisely all I had lacked before; the two dead languages stirred and lived, the dry bones moved, and the sinews and the flesh came up on them, and the skin covered them, and the winds of the delicate Athenian air breathed upon them. Four years ago Beesly had awakened in me the sense of the Greek genius for beauty, but not till now had the flame spread to the language. That for me had always smouldered and smoked under the damp of grammar and accents; now, when I could learn as I chose, it flared up. Prosody and inflexions, moods and cases, all that was tedious to acquire, need no longer be learned by rule; the knowledge of rules began to dawn on me merely by incessantly coming across examples of them, and I began to learn under the tuition of admiration. The same thrilled interest invaded Latin also, and it was no longer what could be made of the languages in English that attracted me, but what they were in themselves. Such study did not lead to accurate scholarship, but it gave me what was of much greater value to one who did not mean to spend his life in editing school-books, namely, an inkling of the infinite flexibility of language and joy in the cadences of words, while from the scholastic standpoint it added the stimulus which enabled me not to remain at Cambridge such a hopeless dunce at classics as I had hitherto always been. All the teaching I had ever received had failed to make me apply such intelligence as I was possessed of, directly and vividly: there had never been any sunshine, as regards language, in the earlier grey days of learning, for the sky had always pelted with gerunds and optatives.... With that illumination a great light shone on English also: in the galloping race of composition at home I, at any rate, had much preferred to run than to read, but now I plunged headlong into the