What is it that roareth thus?
Can it be a motor-bus?
Yes! the reek and hideous hum
Indicant motorem bum. 

     But the motor-bus was still in the future when I was trudging my way through the conjugations: the active voice, always friendly, except for a tendency to confusion between the future indicative and present subjunctive of the third and fourth conjugations (the rot always seemed to set in at the Third Anything); the passive voice always lumbering and hostile; the deponents lurking meanly about, hoping to delude one into construing them as passives; verbs like fero, so triumphantly irregular as to be permanently unforgettable; verbs with reduplicated perfects of a giggling absurdity-peperi was always good for a hearty Victorian pun-and defectives, which were simply a mess.  It is a nostalgic memory that I could at one time recite the whole table of irregulars without more than an occasional side-slip; and I still remember that utor, fruor, vescor, fungor are followed by the ablative, when many more generally useful fragments of knowledge have slipped into Lethe and vanished.

     By this time, of course, the girls, the poets and the roses had slipped into the background.  We marched with Caesar, built walls with Balbo, and admired the conduct of Cornelia, who brought up her children diligently in order that they might be good citizens.  The mighty forest of syntax opened up its glades to exploration, adorned with its three monumental trees-the sturdy accusative and infinitive, the graceful ablative absolute, and the banyan-like and proliferating ut and the subjunctive.  Beneath their roots lurked a horrid scrubby tangle of words beginning with u, q and n, and a nasty rabbit-warren of prepositions.  There was also a horrid region, beset with pitfalls and mantraps, called Oratio Obliqua, into which one never entered without a shudder, and where, starting off from a simple accusative and infinitive, one tripped over sprawling dependent clauses and bogged one's self down in the consecution of tenses, till one fell over a steep precipice into a Pluperfect Subjunctive, and was seen no more.

     I do not know why the recollection of all this is pleasant to me.  Why, for example, did I in those days greatly prefer Latin to the French, of which I later became a master?  I do not think my father was a particularly inspired teacher; his methods would now be called unimaginative and old-fashioned to the last degree.  One reason may, I fancy, have been that the pronunciation, being flat-footedly English, gave me no trouble; another, that the complications of the morphology and syntax released in me some kind of low cunning which today finds expression in the solving of crossword puzzles.

     By the time I was thirteen, the French had hauled up hand over fist upon the Latin, and overtaken it. I had a French governess with whom I conversed, and I read Moliëre and The Three Musketeers. I was not trained to converse in Latin, and the Augustan age produced no Dumas. This was, I think, a pity.

     I was, indeed, introduced to the Latin authors. The day arrived on which, toiling very slowly with a vocabulary, I began to work my way line by line through the episode of Pyramus and Thisbe from the Metamorphoses.  After which we embarked, at the same snail's pace, upon the second book of the Aeneid.

     My father's way with the involutions of the classic hexameter was calculated to lighten the labour of the student, though I am not sure whether it was the best approach to the literary beauties of Virgil.  Having explained the construction of the verse and brought me to the point of at least grasping the rhythm of the concluding dactyl and spondee, he would then kindly take my brief daily portion, tear it word from word, and rearrange the disjecta membra in the order in which Virgil would have written them had he been writing simply English prose for use in lower forms.  The consequence is that to this day I find it very difficult to assemble the clauses in any classic verse, or to decide which adjective belongs to which noun, or to see what principle, other than the brute necessity of getting the quantities in the right place, governs the order of the words in a line.  In the end, of course, these props and crutches were taken away from me, and I was left to grope my way about the verse for myself; but it never seemed more than a kind of jig-saw.

     I cannot recollect what prose passages I read, if any, with my father.  Memory throws up the name of Cornelius Nepos, but with nothing attached to it.  The great trouble, I am sure, was the appalling slowness with which I proceeded.  The shape of the thing as a story or a poem was lost in the slow grubbing over the ground.  I could not then, much less since, ever read any passage of classical Latin swiftly, or by the eye; although in my early teens I could read and write French almost as quickly and correctly as English; and was not far behind in German.

     As soon as I took up residence in Oxford, I was sent to a warrior called Mr. Herbert May, with instructions that I was to be crammed through Smalls.  Mr. May lived in a narrow, semi-detached house in the gloomier purlieus of Oxford, in a perpetual atmosphere of snuff.  With this he refreshed himself all through his coachings; and I would not grudge him a single pinch of it, for his life must have been a hard one.  So far as I know, he spent all his time with people like me.  He was the indefatigable seagull, forever winging his way through the clashing rocks of Latin Prose and Greek Unseens with a fleet of dismal and inexperienced Argonauts thrashing the seas at his tail.  A kindlier and more imperturbable man I never met.  In two terms he accomplished what my school-teachers had not ventured to undertake in four years.

     We pounded our way through the Hecuba and the Alcestis; we coped with the Aorist; we mowed down under our feet that weedy growth of repulsive particles with which the Greek language is infested.  Oddly enough, I cannot recall what the Latin set books were, if any; but from the fact that I still remember a few lines of the Sixth Aeneid, I am inclined to think that we may have had to tackle it.  My only distinct recollection is of making my way through a series of Latin Proses, and of Mr. May, choking with laughter and snuff over some more than usually proposterous howler, recovering himself to say encouragingly: "Well, Miss Sayers, you do make the most elementary errors, but I will say for you that what you write is Latin."  By which I took him to mean that I did instinctively frame the sentence after the high Roman fashion, collecting everything into a vast articulated complex of clauses and sub-clauses before proceeding to adorn the structure with passive deponents and the non-existent parts of defective verbs.  And I conclude from this that it was not my linguistic sense that was at fault, but that with more imaginative teaching I might have made as good a job of Latin as of German or French.

     I got through Responsions, and that was the end of that.  The Degree course allowed me to do my Mods. in Modern Languages.  The Latin I no longer required began to slip away through the sieve of preoccupation.  The Greek lingered only long enough to steer me through a couple of Testaments for the now obsolete Divinity Mods., and then followed the Latin down the drain.  Two contacts only remained.  I was reading French, and the Old French required for the Language Papers demanded a minimum acquaintance with the Latin roots, morphology and syntax.  And as a member of the Bach Choir I learned to sing the Latin Mass and a number of mediaeval hymns and carols.

     This added yet another pronunciation to my collection-the ecclesiastical.  I had been brought up to say "Pleeni sunt ceeli"; school had commanded me to say "Playnee soont koilee"; I now sang "Playnee soont chaylee".  I had never, and I have never, been able to dissociate the written word from the spoken sound; if I cannot pronounce I cannot read. With the fragmentation of the sounds the disintegration of control followed so fast that at this stage in my career I could scarcely have read ten consecutive Latin words aloud in a consistent pronunciation and without false quantities, or construed ten consecutive lines.

     Yet I believe that it was about this time that a dim glamour which had haunted me all my childhood, and haunts me to this day, began to shine into my mind like the sun rising through a mist-the shimmering, spell-binding magic of the medieval Latin.

     Everybody is, I suppose, either Classic or Gothic by nature.  Either you feel in your bones that buildings should be rectangular boxes with lids to them, or you are moved to the marrow by walls that climb and branch, and break into a [sic] inflorescence of pinnacles. And however successfully you educate yourself to a just appreciation of the other kind, it will never have the same power to capture you soul and body in your unguarded moments.

     In the same way, you either have the austere taste which delights in the delicate interplay of stress and quantity in the hexameter-only you must remember that nobody had ever once thought of showing me how that worked-or you have the more (if you like) twopence-coloured taste that reacts powerfully to:

Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum
Coget omnes ante tronum.

Augustine was moved to tears by the sorrows and death of Dido, and with good reason:

illa, graves oculos conata attollere, rursus
deficit, infixum stridet sub pectore volnus.
ter sese attollens cubitoque adnixa levavit:
ter revoluta toro est, oculisque errantibus alto
quaesivit caelo lucem, ingemuitque reperta.

A more plangent and piercing cry goes up from the foot of the Cross:

Pro peccatis sui gentis
vidit Jesum in tormentis
et flagellis subditum;
vidit suum dulcem natum
moriendo desolatum
dum emisit spiritum.

     But I want to come back to this later.  For the moment I will only leave on record that my Latin education ended upon this note.  It ended, I say, there, leaving me, after close on twenty years' teaching, unable to read a single Latin author with ease or fluency, unable to write a line of Latin without gross error, unfamiliar with the style and scope of any Latin author, except as I had taken refuge in English translations, and stammering of speech because by this time all three pronunciations were equally alien and uncertain. And this was a thing that never ought to have happened to me, because I was born with the gift of tongues.