Of course, just because the boys had a finer and fuller moral education does not mean that they always came out as paragons of virtue and wisdom. The humanistic education of the time has even been described as mainly a technique for turning out cocky, fluent public figures with no genuine intellectual curiosity or serious thought in their heads at all. There is some justice in this, and I have noticed in early twenty-first-century Britain that an ability to sling around Latin quotations while behaving like a cad can still take you a long way.
