ABSTRACT
William and Robert Chambers gobbled up everything that their father brought home, and by nine or ten years old had read Gulliver, Don Quixote, the poetry of Pope and Goldsmith, and as much travel and adventure as they could get their hands on. Ever since John Knox’s Book of Discipline laid out plans for universal education, available to rich and poor equally in all the most inaccessible regions of the country, the presumption has been that the ‘lad of pairts’ has had an equal chance of getting on in the world, of getting to university particularly, whatever his status. Classics, and particularly Latin, were drummed into the Grammar School pupils because they needed to have some knowledge of it if they wanted to move onto the next and last stage of their education, the university. Destitution was everywhere apparent; the daily appearance of an old crippled woman being pushed on a handcart to beg was something Robert accepted as normal.
