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Personally I have always regarded it as a matter of congratulation that I escaped from school at a comparatively early age, nor can I honestly say that I remember to-day anything that I formerly learnt at school, or that if I did remember anything I learnt, there,—except perhaps a few irregular French verbs—that it would be of the slightest use to me in the everyday business of life.

If I were, for instance, to model my methods of trial in the County Court upon the proceedings of Euclid, who spent his life in endeavouring to prove by words, propositions that were self-evident even in his own very rudimentary pictures, I should be justly blamed by a commercial community for wasting their time. Yet how many of the most precious hours of the best of my youth have been wasted for me by schoolmasters, who were so dull as not to perceive that Euclid, like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, was the writer of a book of nonsense? Not nonsense that can possibly appeal to the child of to-day, but nonsense that will always have its place in the library of those to whom the Absurd is as precious in life as the Beautiful.