He left school at fourteen, as did most of the poorer children of the British Isles. There was no money for him to go on to the fee-paying grammar school in nearby Melrose, and in any case his parents enjoyed some confidence in the lad’s ability to teach himself – by pursuing, as he had vowed, the vita diligentissima. Their hopes proved well founded: James continued to amass more and more knowledge, if only (as he would admit) for the sake of knowledge itself, and often in the most eccentric of ways.
He engaged in furious digs at a multitude of archaeological sites all over the Borders (which, being close to Hadrian’s Wall, was a treasure trove of buried antiquities); he had made attempts to teach the local cows to respond to calls in Latin; he would read out loud, by the light of a minute oil lamp, the works of a Frenchman with the grand name of Thédore Agrippa d’Aubigné, and translating for his family, who gathered about him, fascinated.
Once, trying to invent water wings made from bundles of pond iris, he tied them to his arms but was turned upside down by more buoyancy than he calculated, and would have drowned (he was a nonswimmer) had not his friends rescued him by pulling him from the lake with his five-foot-long bow tie. He memorized hundreds of phrases in Romany, the language of the passing Gypsies; he learned bookbinding; he taught himself to embellish his own writings with elegant little drawings, flourishes, and curlicues, rather like the monkish illuminators of the Middle Ages.
Source:
Winchester, Simon. “The Man Who Taught Latin to Cattle.” The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. HarperPerennial, 1999. 33-4. Print.
Further Reading:
Sir James Augustus Henry Murray: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Murray_(lexicographer)
If you enjoy this type of content, please consider donating to my Patreon!
No comments, yet...