They were starving,
through being over-crammed with the wrong things. Nature came down
upon them, but she did not come down on Theobald and Christina. Why
should she? They were not leading a starved existence. There are two
classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are
sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong
to the first than to the second.
CHAPTER XXVII
I WILL give no more of the details of my hero's earlier years.
Enough that he struggled through them, and at twelve years old knew
every page of his Latin and Greek Grammars by heart. He had read the
greater part of Virgil, Horace, and Livy, and I do not know how many
Greek plays: he was proficient in arithmetic, knew the first four
books of Euclid thoroughly, and had a fair knowledge of French. It was
now time he went to school, and to school he was accordingly to go,
under the famous Dr. Skinner of Roughborough.
Theobald had known Dr. Skinner slightly at Cambridge. He had been
a burning and a shining light in every position he had filled from his
boyhood upwards. He was a very great genius. Everyone knew this;
they said, indeed, that he was one of the few people to whom the
word genius could be applied without exaggeration.
Pages:
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195