Memoirs of Richard Cumberland Author:Richard Cumberland 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: which by the terms of its establishment was subject to the visitation of those who were in the government of it, and I remember upon a certain occasion, when the... more »se gentlemen entered the school-room, in the execution of their office, (I being then in the rostrum in the act of construing Juvenal) he ordered me to proceed without noticing their appearance, and something having passed to give him offence against one of their number in particular, taking up the passage then under immediate recitation, he echoed forth in a loud and pointed tone of voice— JVbs, nostraque Kvidtts ocKt. It must be confessed that my good old master had a vaunting kind of style in setting forth his school, and once in conversation with my grandfather in Trinity Lodge, he was so unaccountably misled by the spirit of false prophecy, as to venture to say in a rallying kind of way—" Master, I will make your grandson as good a " scholar as yourself."—To this Doctor Bentley in the like vein of raillery replied—" Pshaw, Arthur, how can that be, when I have " forgot more than thou ever knew'st ?" Certain it is that my inauspicious beginnings augured very ill for the bold prediction, thus improvidently hazarded; for so supremely idle was I, and so far from being animated by the charms of the Latin grammar, that the labour of instruction was but labour lost, and it seemed a chance if I was destined to arrive at any other acquirement but the art of sinking, in which I regularly proceeded till I found my proper station at the very bottom of my class, which, as far as idleness could be my security, I was likely to take lasting possession of. I am persuaded however that the tranquillity of my ignorance would have suffered no interruption from the remonstrances of the worthy usher of the under-school, who sate in ...« less