me; and I was once very anxious about the next day, when this exercise was to be performed, in which I had failed till I was discouraged. My mother encouraged me, and I proceeded better. When I told her of my good escape, 'We often,' said she, dear mother! 'come off best, when we are most afraid.' She told me, that, once when she asked me about forming verbs, I said, 'I did not form them in an ugly shape.' 'You could not,' said she, 'speak plain; and I was proud that I had a boy who was forming verbs.' These little memorials sooth my mind. Of the parts of Corderius[1] or Æsop, which we learned to repeat, I have not the least recollection, except of a passage in one of the Morals, where it is said of some man, that, when he hated another, he made him rich; this I repeated emphatically in my mother's hearing, who could never conceive that riches could bring any evil. She remarked it, as I expected.
I had the curiosity, two or three years ago, to look over Garretson's Exercises, Willymot's Particles[2], and Walker's Exercises; and found very few sentences that I should have recollected if I had found them in any other books. That which is read without pleasure is not often recollected nor infixed by conversation, and therefore in a great measure drops from the memory[3]. Thus it happens that those who are taken early from school, commonly lose all that they had learned.
When we learned As in Præsenti, we parsed Propria quæ Maribus by Hool's Terminations; and, when we learned Syntaxis, we parsed As in Præsenti; and afterwards Quæ Genus, by the same book; sometimes, as I remember, proceeding in order of the rules, and sometimes, particularly in As in Præsenti, taking words as they occurred in the Index.
- ↑ The ensign in Tom Jones (Bk. vii, c. 12) exclaimed: – 'And there's Corderius, another d——d son of a whore that hath got me many a flogging.'
- ↑ 'It is not commonly known,' writes Malone, 'that the translation of Bacon's Essays into Latin, which was published in 1619, was done by the famous John Selden. One Willymot, a schoolmaster, was foolish enough to re-translate these Essays into English in the beginning of this [the eighteenth] century.' Prior's Malone, p. 424.
- ↑ 'A man,' said Johnson, 'ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.' Life, i. 428.
