“My stock of Latin learning, with which to begin my studies of the city, consisted of the two first books of Livy, never well known, and the names of places remembered without ever looking where they were on a map; Juvenal, a page or two of Tacitus, and in Virgil the burning of Troy, the story of Dido, the episode of Euryalus, and the last battle. Of course, I had nominally read the whole Æneid, but thought most of it nonsense. Of later Roman history, I had read English abstracts of the imperial vices, and supposed the malaria in the Campagna to be the consequence of the Papacy. I had never heard of a good Roman Emperor, or a good Pope; was not quite sure whether Trajan lived before Christ or after, and would have thanked, with a sense of relieved satisfaction, anybody who might have told me that Marcus Antoninus was a Roman philosopher contemporary with Socrates.... We of course drove about the town, and saw the Forum, Coliseum, and so on. I had no distinct idea what the Forum was or ever had been, or how the three pillars, or the seven, were connected with it, or the Arch of Severus.... What the Forum or Capitol had been, I did not in the least care; the pillars of the Forum I saw were on a small scale, and their capitals rudely carved, and the houses above them nothing like so interesting as the side of any close in the ‘auld toun’ of Edinburgh.” =Wordsworth and Ruskin, aloof from the Past.=—Wordsworth, too, stood aloof. He was aware of “Old, unhappy, far-off things And battles long ago;” but the past of nations did not enthral him; even the throes of the French Revolution, to judge by what he tells us in the _Prelude_, hardly shook him to his foundation, though he took a walking tour on the Continent at the moment when, as he himself says— “As if awaked from sleep, the nations hailed Their great expectancy.” But for him— “I looked upon these things As from a distance; heard and saw and felt, Was touched, but with no intimate concern.” =Knowledge learned in Schools.=—As for the _Knowledge learned in Schools_, Ruskin gives us rather dry details of his experiences in Euclid, the Latin grammar, and the like, but neither boy appears to have been ‘stung with the rapture of a sudden thought’ in the course of his lessons, unless Hawkshead Grammar School can take this to itself:— “Many are our joys In youth, but oh! what happiness to live When every hour brings palpable access Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight, And sorrow is not there!” But the praise of the unfolding of the seasons follows, and I am afraid it is the lore they brought with them that the poet had in his mind’s eye.