Life of John Duncan Author:David Brown General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1872 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. GRAMMAR-SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY LIFE : 1805-1814. John Duncan entered the Grammar School, it would appear, in the year 1805-6, when he was nine years of age. This school, though not then so distinguished for the accurate scholarship it imparted, as in subsequent years under the late Dr. Melvin and his disciples, had even then superior masters, and sent students to the University who traced their distinction at College and in after life in no small degree to the training received and the tastes and aptitudes acquired at the Grammar School. Of its five classes, taught by four masters, the Rector had the two highest -- the fourth and fifth -- ranged on opposite sides of one class-room, so that the boys of the one class could see who excelled in the other. This will explain the following bit of information which I have from a gentleman now resident in London: -- " John Duncan was in the fourth class when I was in the fifth. He was considered a clever scholar, maintaining his position in the first ' faction' [or bench -- each ' faction ' containing only four boys]. He was rather eccentric in his dress and carriage, but I was not at all intimate with him." Curiously enough, even at this early period the twin passions of his mental life -- Languages and Metaphysics -- had begun to take hold of him. As to Languages, when in the fourth class, at the age of about twelve and a half, he was detected reading Ariosto under the " faction."1 And with respect to Metaphysics, I find the following singular entry in one of his conversations with Mr. Knight: -- " When at the Grammar School in Aberdeen, I got h...« less