“Like many boys unhappy at school Lear built an inner life and learned that one way to be accepted was to make people laugh, to become an amiable buffoon. While he fretted about being ‘half-educated’ he was glad, he said later, to have escaped the straitjacket of conventional teaching, as so many of those who had been laboriously and expensively educated lost their learning, ‘& remain like Swift’s Stullbruggs – cut & dried for life, making no use of their earlier-gained treasures: – whereas I seem to be on the threshold of knowledge’.”