APPENDIX 613

were exhausted in reading Greek to please them, and in coming down from the side of Skiddaw or Ben Ledi punctually to seven o’clock tea.

After all analysis, however, possible to me of the mischances, or at the time adverse coincidences, which reduced me to this inanition, I cannot explain the grasp it had on a youth of my inner fervour and impressionability. The only aspect under which it becomes intelligible to me is that of the torpor and deformity of a chrysalid. I had wriggled through infancy, and through the days of boyhood, as a sufficiently lively and amiable little caterpillar. I had left off my leaf diet,-wanted honey, before I had any wings or proboscis,-and had tumbled over into a brown bundle of unknown capabilities, without having had sense enough first to spin a cocoon.

I do not in the least remember by what animating heat, or provoking touch, I was stirred out of this chrysalid torpor into the beginning of my real life’s work. Perhaps my good-natured old friend Mr. Loudon, of whom I must give some account presently, had asked of me, or perhaps in some sudden instincts of loquacity I had offered him, a series of papers for his Architectural Magazine on the native characters of Architecture.¹

[This passage in the MS. follows the one about Catterick Bridge, below, p. 625.]

I said just now that I spent much of my day in the idea of reading. Curiously, I don’t remember, in Yorkshire or the Lakes, that year, opening a single book! But I must have done something, for I was reading for honours, and under distinct tutorial orders, which I entirely meant to obey. Books I must have opened, and mechanically read, and looked out the words I did not know in the dictionary. Somehow I did scrape together some knowledge of Attic Greek; of Homer I never could construe a line, but really mastered the non-construction of Thucydides, and could find my way about in Plato. It seems to me-looking back-as if I never knew or read any Latin at all, except-of all books in the world-Juvenal -the worst and ugliest that could have been put into my hands,-but which I did master, and which founded sternly my first notions of national fault and dishonour in Rome, and so far as she has followed falling Rome, in England.

Thus, in some degree progressive, the third year of Oxford residence -perhaps too much despised by me in its farther Greek reading-passed serenely enough, wasted only in the pains spent on my third try for the Newdigate-which I got at last, to my father’s tearful joy-and my own entirely ridiculous and ineffable conceit and puffing up. I cannot understand how schoolmasters of sense allow their boys ever to try for prizes.

We went on our summer travels that year, 1839, to Cornwall, where I expected the miners to regard me with admiration as the winner of the Newdigate-where, however, I still had the grace and sense to spend all the time I could get, after my miserable forenoon’s task of Lucretius was done, in staring at the sea.² I have ever since held it the most hopeless sign of a man’s mind being made of flint-shingle if he liked Lucretius.

¹ [See i. § 250 (p. 224).]

² [Compare pp. 78, 141, 616.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]