Saturday, February 02, 2013
Very Little Classical Reading
Henry L. Thompson, Henry George Liddell, D.D., Dean of Christ Church, Oxford: A Memoir (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1899), p. 11 (quoting Liddell):
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'I left Charterhouse a fair grammar scholar, but with very little classical reading. Russell's teaching did not favour extensive acquirement. Four or five Greek plays, with Porson's notes, two or three books of the Iliad, a little Pindar, Cicero's Offices and some of his Orations, with some few additions, constituted the bulk of what we read in school. But we learnt by heart all the Odes and Epodes of Horace (as I have before said), and the Georgics of Virgil, for which I am, and have been, always grateful. We also read most of the Satires and Epistles. But Greek Prose was almost untrodden ground. Herodotus and Thucydides were known only by name. I do not recollect having read any Greek Prose, except Plato's Apology.'
