第4章 EARLY YEARS(3)

Not much, however, of Kinglake's time was given to his native town: he was early sent to the Grammar School at Ottery St. Mary's, the"Clavering" of "Pendennis," whose Dr. Wapshot was George Coleridge, brother of the poet. He was wont in after life to speak of this time with bitterness; a delicate child, he was starved on insufficient diet; and an eloquent passage in "Eothen" depicts his intellectual fall from the varied interests and expanding enthusiasm of liberal home teaching to the regulation gerund- grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. "The dismal change is ordained, and then - thin meagre Latin with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of 'Scriptores Romani,' - from Greek poetry, down, down to the cold rations of 'Poetae Graeci,' cut up by commentators, and served out by school- masters!"At Eton - under Keate, as all readers of "Eothen" know - he was contemporary with Gladstone, Sir F. Hanmer, Lords Canning and Dalhousie, Selwyn, Shadwell. He wrote in the "Etonian," created and edited by Mackworth Praed; and is mentioned in Praed's poem on Surly Hall as"Kinglake, dear to poetry, And dear to all his friends."Dr. Gatty remembers his "determined pale face"; thinks that he made his mark on the river rather than in the playing fields, being a good oar and swimmer. His great friend at school was Savile, the "Methley" of his travels, who became successively Lord Pollington and Earl of Mexborough. The Homeric lore which Methley exhibited in the Troad, is curiously illustrated by an Eton story, that in a pugilistic encounter with Hoseason, afterwards an Indian Cavalry officer, while the latter sate between the rounds upon his second's knee, Savile strutted about the ring, spouting Homer.