Laudator Temporis Acti

Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972), Greece in My Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), pp. 10-12:

Then came a summons from the High Master. I was received in the room where the Normandy landing would be planned nearly fifty years later. Frederick William Walker, the greatest headmaster of the Victorian age, rumbled at me from the depths of his long grey beard to which adhered morsels of stale food and the acrid scent of stale cigars. He had a voice like ten bulls, but he was deaf and after bellowing in a paralysing bass he would always finish a question or an observation with an intoned 'um' of tenor interrogation.

....

'Are you defying me, my boy? Um?' he roared.

"No, sir. I'm not defying you.'

And then in sudden desperation I felt I must burn my boats by making a decision I have regretted at intervals all my life. 'I want to give up classics and go into the History Eighth.'

....

When I mentioned this to the High Master he turned upon me with these words, uttered in his most solemn and sonorous bass:

'You have been the greatest disappointment to me of any boy who has passed through my hands. You came to this school when you were a year younger than any boy in the school, already able to write Greek iambics beyond the ability of many boys very much older than yourself. You could have been as great a Greek scholar as Jebb or Porson. And you have flung all your gifts away to swagger up and down the corridors of this school with the manners and appearance of a deboshed clerk.'

And with this tremendous sentence I was banished from Parnassus.

I had to stay on, however, in my classical form until the end of the term. We read the Andromache, I remember, and the sixth book of the Odyssey, and also one of the Philippics of Demosthenes. I regret to say that I was unmoved by all three, so much so that one day when I appeared in a purple bow-tie Mr. Cook snapped.

'The sooner you go to the History Eighth and take that tie with you, the better for us all.'