His biographer says that it did more for him
than any other event in the whole course of his education.
Chatham, the greatest of English orators, if we may judge
by the reports of his contemporaries, trained himself for
public speaking by constant translations from Latin and Greek.
The education of his son, the younger Pitt, is well known.
His father compelled him to read Thucydides into English at
sight, and to go over it again and again, until he had got
the best possible rendering of the Greek into English.
Macaulay belonged to the Cambridge Union, where, as in the
society of the same name at Oxford, the great topics of the
day were discussed by men, many of whom afterward became famous
statesmen and debaters in the Commons.
Young Murray, afterward Lord Mansfield, translated Sallust
and Horace with ease; learned great part of them by heart;
could converse fluently in Latin; wrote Latin prose correctly
and idiomatically, and was specially distinguished at Westminster
for his declamations. He translated every oration of Cicero
into English and back again into Latin.
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