They were starving, through
being over-crammed with the wrong things. Nature came down upon them,
but she did not come down on Theobald and Christina. Why should she?
They were not leading a starved existence. There are two classes of
people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if
a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to
the second.
CHAPTER XXVII
I will give no more of the details of my hero's earlier years. Enough
that he struggled through them, and at twelve years old knew every page
of his Latin and Greek Grammars by heart. He had read the greater part
of Virgil, Horace and Livy, and I do not know how many Greek plays: he
was proficient in arithmetic, knew the first four books of Euclid
thoroughly, and had a fair knowledge of French. It was now time he went
to school, and to school he was accordingly to go, under the famous Dr
Skinner of Roughborough.
Theobald had known Dr Skinner slightly at Cambridge. He had been a
burning and a shining light in every position he had filled from his
boyhood upwards. He was a very great genius. Everyone knew this; they
said, indeed, that he was one of the few people to whom the word genius
could be applied without exaggeration.
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