Alpha Book

Orsino was not more highly gifted as to intelligence than many young men
of his age and class. Like many of them he spoke English admirably,
French tolerably, and Italian with a somewhat Roman twang. He had
learned a little German and was rapidly forgetting it again; Latin and
Greek had been exhibited to him as dead languages, and he felt no more
inclination to assist in their resurrection than is felt by most boys in
our day. He had been taught geography in the practical, continental
manner, by being obliged to draw maps from memory. He had been
instructed in history, not by parallels, but as it were by tangents, a
method productive of odd results, and he had advanced just far enough in
the study of mathematics to be thoroughly confused by the terms
"differentiation" and "integration." Besides these subjects, a multitude
of moral and natural sciences had been made to pass in a sort of
panorama before his intellectual vision, including physics, chemistry,
logic, rhetoric, ethics and political economy, with a view to
cultivating in him the spirit of the age.


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