Sunday, September 28, 2014
Autodidacts
Frederic W. MacDonald (1842-1928), "A Book-Loving Grandfather," In a Nook with a Book (London: Horace Marshall & Son, 1907), pp. 59-70 (at 64-65):
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There is something at once pathetic and inspiring in the thought of a solitary student, in town lodgings or country manse, wrestling with noble but exacting studies for which he has had little previous training, and unhelped by tutors and companions. The "small Latin and less Greek" of self-taught men may be a poor thing compared with an adequately trained and fully equipped scholarship; but they are not always to be despised, even from a scholar's point of view, to say nothing of the moral dignity that belongs to studies pursued with a high aim under great disadvantage.
