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84 PRÆTERITA-I
and its meanings; stupid and disconsolate, incapable of any manner of mirth or fancy, thinking mathematics the only proper occupation of human intellect, asthmatic to a degree causing often helpless suffering, and hopelessly poor, spending his evenings, after his school-drudgery was over, in writing manuals of arithmetic and algebra, and compiling French and German grammars, which he allowed the booksellers to cheat him out of,-adding perhaps, with all his year’s lamp-labour, fifteen or twenty pounds to his income; -a more wretched, innocent, patient, insensible, unadmirable, uncomfortable, intolerable being never was produced in this æra of England by the culture characteristic of her metropolis.1
94. Under the tuition, twice a week in the evening, of Mr. Rowbotham, (invited always to substantial tea with us before the lesson as a really efficient help to his hungry science, after the walk up Herne Hill, painful to asthma,) I prospered fairly in 1834, picking up some bits of French grammar, of which I had really felt the want,-I had before got hold, somehow, of words enough to make my way about with,-and I don’t know how, but I recollect, at Paris, going to the Louvre under charge of Salvador,2 (I wanted to make a sketch from Rembrandt’s Supper at Emmaus,3) and on Salvador’s application to the custode for permission, it appeared I was not old enough to have a ticket,-fifteen was then the earliest admission-age; but seeing me look woebegone, the good-natured custode said he thought if I went in to the “Board,” or whatever it was, of authorities, and asked for permission myself, they would give it me. Whereupon I instantly begged to be introduced to the Board, and the custode taking me in under his coat lappets, I did verily, in what broken French
1 [John Rowbotham, author of The Geography of the Globe (1841, still current in 1870), An Abridgement of German Grammar (1833), Cours de Littérature Francaise (1831), Deutsches Lesebuch (1829), Lectiones Latinæ (1832), and of numerous other school-books.]
2 [The courier: see below, pp. 111, 112, 323.]
3 [For another reference to this early study, see Laws of Fésole, ch. vii. (Vol. XV. p. 419 n.).]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
