Laudator Temporis Acti

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), Memoirs of My Life, chapter IV:

It was now that I regretted the early years which had been wasted in sickness or idleness, or more idle reading, that I condemned the perverse method of our schoolmasters who, by first teaching the mother language, might descend with so much ease and perspicuity to the origin and etymology of a derivative idiom. In the nineteenth year of my age I determined to supply this defect, and the lessons of Pavilliard again contributed to smooth the entrance of the way, the Greek alphabet, the grammar and the pronunciation according to the French accent. As he possessed only such a stock as was requisite for an ecclesiastic, our first book was St John’s Gospel, and we should probably have construed the whole of the New Testament had I not represented the absurdity of adhering to the corrupt dialect of the Hellenist Jews. At my earnest request we presumed to open the Iliad; and I had the pleasure of beholding, though darkly and through a glass, the true image of Homer, whom I had long since admired in an English dress. After my tutor, conscious of his inability, had left me to myself I worked my way through about half the Iliad, and afterwards interpreted alone a large portion of Xenophon and Herodotus. But my ardour, destitute of aid and emulation, was gradually cooled, and from the barren task of searching words in a lexicon, I withdrew to the free and familiar conversation of Virgil and Tacitus. Yet in my residence at Lausanne I had laid a solid foundation, which enabled me in a more propitious season to prosecute the study of Grecian literature.