the institution of meter 105
away from the turn-of-the-eighteenth-century model: boys between the ages
of five and eleven were drilled in Latin and Greek so that they could enter the
public schools, commune with the greats, and become model citizens. Latin
was taught first, then Greek through the Latin. Efficiency prevented any de-
tailed understanding of the particulars of vocalized Greek and Latin (the
teacher’s “pronunciation” was often good enough for the pupils), and toward
the late nineteenth century even the Greek and Latin grammars were com-
posed in English rather than Latin, reflecting the premium placed on peda-
gogical efficiency. The pedagogical methods of classical education at the turn
of the nineteenth century were admired and abhorred, but despite all external
pressures, promoters and detractors alike could not escape the entrenched as-
sociation between classical education and rules, measure, and order.
In this context, Bridges, who attended Eton in the late 1850s and early
1860s, was seen as “one of the finest products that the social and educational
caste system of England could produce.”^70 Bridges and Saintsbury shared a
typical classical education (and a birthday).^71 The pedagogic model for teach-
ing Latin and Greek—through memorization, translation, and composi-
tion—is one obvious cause of the brewing disdain for classical pedagog y at the
end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century; outdated
methodologies especially marginalized the teaching of Greek.^72 James Brinsley-
Richards, a colleague of Bridges at Eton who seems only to be known for his
popular memoir, Seven Years at Eton (1857–64) confessed, “in truth we
learned very little, beyond maundering by rote Latin rules as many as were
wanted for the day’s lessons; and from day to day we forgot what we had com-
mitted to our tongues’ tips the day before.”^73 The students learned physically
“by rote,” yet did not commit the rules to memory; the vocalized discipline of
language intending to shape the young pupil’s mind through its rigid form,
according to this memoir, does not even reach the student’s mind. Indeed, the
rules were so transient in Brinsley-Richards’s mind that they came alive only
on the “tongue-tips” of the students; the dead languages resuscitated only
when spoken, not awakened by any nostalgic memory of comprehension or
humanistic transformation. Classical pedagog y turned classical verse forms
into abstractions that symbolized more than they actually meant.
Bridges became poet laureate in 1913 and the first poem that he published,
“Flycatchers,” was significant both because within it he states his disdain for
the pedagogical methods of the classical education he received but also be-
cause in publishing the poem in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama he aligns
himself with a younger generation whose civilizing literature was English and
who did not necessarily believe in the necessity of the classical traditions.^74 In
“Flycatchers,” Bridges recalls “a time sixty summers ago / When, a young
chubby chap, I sat just so / With others on a school-form rank’d in a row, / Not
less eager and hungry than you.”^75 The pupils, “ranked” by their progress in
class and ordered in a row, are figured as birds: “sweet pretty fledglings, perched