But though these exercises in history were never a compulsory lesson,
there was another kind of composition which was so, namely, writing
verses, and it was one of the most disagreeable of my tasks. Greek
and Latin verses I did not write, nor learnt the prosody of those
languages. My father, thinking this not worth the time it required,
contented himself with making me read aloud to him, and correcting
false quantities. I never composed at all in Greek, even in prose, and
but little in Latin. Not that my father could be indifferent to the
value of this practice, in giving a thorough knowledge of these
languages, but because there really was not time for it. The verses
I was required to write were English. When I first read Pope's Homer,
I ambitiously attempted to compose something of the same kind, and
achieved as much as one book of a continuation of the _Iliad_. There,
probably, the spontaneous promptings of my poetical ambition would
have stopped; but the exercise, begun from choice, was continued by
command. Conformably to my father's usual practice of explaining to
me, as far as possible, the reasons for what he required me to do,
he gave me, for this, as I well remember, two reasons highly
characteristic of him: one was, that some things could be expressed
better and more forcibly in verse than in prose: this, he said, was
a real advantage.
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