Bacon inveighs against the scholastic trifling of his day; Milton talks of
the waste of time on litigious brawling; Locke mocks at the logic of the
schools; Cowley complains of being taught words, not things; Gibbon
rejoices over his escape from the port and prejudice of Magdalen;
Wordsworth contemns the "trade in classic niceties," and roves "in
magisterial liberty" by the Cam, as afterwards among the hills.
But all those hostile critics owe much to the object of their
animadversion. Any schoolboy can refer the preference of Light to Fruit in
the _Novum Organum_, half of _Comus_ and _Lycidas_, the stately periods of
the _Decline and Fall_, and the severe beauties of _Laodamia_, to the
better influences of academic training on the minds of their authors.
Similarly, the richest pages of Byron's work--from the date of _The Curse
of Minerva_ to that of the "Isles of Greece"--are brightened by lights and
adorned by allusions due to his training, imperfect as it was, on the
slopes of Harrow, and the associations fostered during his truant years by
the sluggish stream of his "Injusta noverca.
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