Gossip Author:Henry Morley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BEOTHEE MIETH AND HIS BEOTHEES. Why do I look lovingly back on the two years of childhood passed in exile from all friends at home, among one or two hundred b... more »oys under the guidance of one or two dozen masters ? Why do I believe, as I do firmly, that I learned precious things in that German school which suffered me to forget my little Greek, and to dwindle down from a precocious bolter of Virgil to a bad decliner of rex, regis; which administered its Euclid in homoeopathic doses ; which taught me to write in mystic characters that had to be unlearnt at home; and in which I cannot remember that I ever did a sum ? Why do I believe that I learned more than ever in the same time before or after, till I went as a man into the school of sorrow ? For the benefit of teachers, let me try to look at that school from the boy's point of view, and find out what the lessons were by which I profited. From several English boarding-schools through which I had been shifted with the vain hope of finding, at last, one that was a proper place of education, I went to New Unkraut on the Rhine, a very little boy: experienced in the applications of the fag, familiar with the respective powers of fists, stones, nuts, whipcord in all its combinations, bumping against corners of wall, tommy and cane, and other means of torture. I had learned to be reckless about blows, to regard a big boy or a schoolmaster as a natural enemy, and to feel proud because there were few others so prompt to defy or insult the teacher, or to bite him while he plied the stick. I was familiar with filth and falsehood. I am ashamed to think of all that I, a very young child, had learned, and I wonder at the little incidents belonging to that time, which show how hard a struggle the good spirit that belongs to childhood hadmainta...« less