I had my two grammars literally by heart, notes and all.
Then we revised as thoroughly as possible, reading everything anew,
and leaving no passage unexplained. I learned to scan, too, a fact
that was sufficient to make a reputation for a scholar, in America,
half a century since. [*] After this, we turned our attention to
mathematics, a science Mr. Hardinge rightly enough thought there was
no danger of my acquiring too thoroughly. We mastered arithmetic, of
which I had a good deal of previous knowledge, in a few weeks, and
then I went through trigonometry, with some of the more useful
problems in geometry. This was the point at which I had arrived when
my mother's death occurred.
[Footnote *: The writer's master taught him to scan Virgil in
1801. This gentleman was a graduate of Oxford. In 1803, the class to
which the writer then belonged in Yale, was the first that ever
attempted to scan in that institution. The quantities were in sad
discredit in this country, years after this, though Columbia and
Harvard were a little in advance of Yale. All that was ever done in
the last college, during the writer's time, was to scan the ordinary
hexameter of Homer and Virgil.]
As for myself, I frankly admit a strong disinclination to be
learned. The law I might be forced to study, but practising it was a
thing my mind had long been made up never to do.
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