ABSTRACT
Admirers of A Year Amongst the Persians, and they are not few, for the book ranks high in the literature of travel, will remember the vigorous and enchanting paragraphs in which the author sets out his views on the teaching of languages, and describes his own experiences in mastering those for the know ledge of which he was famous throughout the world. Y es: the writer was E. G. Browne-Persian Browne, a man whose
Edward Granville Browne was born on February 7, 1862, at Uley near Dursley, in Gloucestershire, the son of Sir Benjamin Browne who was for many years head of the engineering and shipbuilding firm of R. and W. Hawthorn, Leslie and Co. of Newcastle-on-Tyne. The family fortune was thus considerable, and the boy was sent to the orthodox preparatory school, then to Glenalmond, and finally to Eton. ‘ If boys are sent to school to learn what the word disagreeable means, and to realise that the most tedious monotony is perfectly com patible with the most acute misery, and that the most assiduous labour, if it be not wisely directed, does not necessarily secure the attainment of the object ostensibly aimed at, then, indeed, does the public school offer the surest means of attaining this end. The most wretched day of my life, except the day when I left college, was the day I went to school. Dur ing the earlier portion of my school life I believe that I nearly fathomed the possibilities of human misery and despair. I learned then {what I am thankful to say I have unlearned since) to be a pessimist, a misanthrope, and a cynic; and I have learned since, what I did not understand then, that to know by rote a quantity of grammatical rules is in itself not much more useful than to know how often each letter of the alphabet occurs in Taradise Lost, or how many separate stones went to the building of the Great Pyramid.’
