THE SKETCHER.

Otago Witness, Issue 1934, 19 March 1891, Page 31

THE SKETCHER.

SOME ILL -(SCHOOLED GENIUSES. Newton and Scott were both dilatory scholars, though on occasions they would make a spurt and prove what they could, do. Goldsmith earned for himself among his schoolfellows the reputation of a " stupid, heavy blockhead." Coleridge, too, when at Christ's Hospital, was much given to desultory reading. Balzac is a clear instance of a school failure. Instead of setting himself like a proper boy to master the prescribed subjects, he buried himself in mystic literature and indulged in day dreaming. He went out of his way, too, to write a treatise on the Human Will, an irregularity which one of his masters naturally enough punished by committing the MS. to the flames. Perhaps, however, the typical instance of the stupidity of genius is Rousseau. He was a thorough dunce and knew it, though he tries to account for it by a hypersensitive nature. Pope, when at school, showed his taste for vituperation by lampooning his master. Addison is said to have run away from school after committing some breach of discipline. He was also the leader of a " barring out " at the grammar school to which he afterwards went. Southey, as is well known, was expelled from school for penning a spirited article on flogging in a school publication. Byron was another rebel against the scholastic powers. He hated Harrow, found the drudgeries of accurate scholarship intolerable, and was "famons for rowing." The defiance by young genius of scholastic powers is well illustrated by the incident Sterne relates out of his school life. The master, he tells us, " had had the ceiling of the schoolroom new whitewashed, and the ladder remained there. I, one unlucky day, j mounted it and wrote with a brush in large capital letters, • LAU. STERNE,' " an act'for which the usher naturally flogged him, though the master (according to Sterne) administered balm to his wounds in the shape of a flattering prophecy. . Cowper's miserable experiences at his first school in Hertfordshire are well known, as also his bitter invective against school education in his poem, "Tirocinium." 3oldsmith, too, was a small, awkwardly -shaped boy, and had the unenviable distinction of being the butt of the school. De Quincy, who had shown himself a brilliant pupil at Bath, went through such a doleful time of it at Manchester Grammar School that, after three years, he ran off. Quite recently Mr Anthony TrolloDe has given us his miserable recollections of Rugby. Nor have these unhappy school experiences .been confined to eminent Englishmen. Schiller found the mechanical drudgery of theDukeofWurtemberg's school irritating and galling, and says that the six years he passed there were the most harassing and comfortless of his whole life. Lamartine was so unhappy at school that he had to be removed and entrusted to a private tutor. Finally, in this record of ill-schooled genius we have a number of testimonies in the writings of eminent men to the low opinion they entertained of the scholastic institution. Besides the poem of Oowper, there are the amusing satires of Heine in the " Reisebilder." It is possible that we have a reminiscence of his own experiences in the following: — "In the dark cloisters of the Franciscan convent, which were close to our schoolroom, there used to hang a big crucifix of grey wood, a grim carving which even now at times haunts my dreams and stares at me mournfully with bleeding eyes. Before this image I often stood and prayed. 'O, thou poor Deity, once tortured like myself, if it be possible grant that I may remember the verbairregularia.'" Shelley is supposed to be referring to his experiences at Eton in the lines : —