What exactly was involved in this? Would a student be content with reading the lines? Translating them? Was he prepping for an "unseens" examination, or a specific examination on the particular text that he was reading?"Frank," said the sister to her elder brother, knocking at his door when they had all gone up stairs, 'may I come in,--if you are not in bed?"
"In bed," said he, looking up with some little pride from his Greek book; "I've one hundred and fifty lines to do before I can get to bed. It'll be two, I suppose. I've got to mug uncommon hard these holidays. I have only one more half, you know, and then----"
"Don't overdo it, Frank."
"No; I won't overdo it. I mean to take one day a week, and work eight hours a day on the other five. That will be forty hours a week, and will give me just two hundred hours for the holidays. I have got it all down here on a table. That will be a hundred and five for Greek play, forty for Algebra--" and so he explained to her the exact destiny of all his long hours of proposed labour. He had as yet been home a day and a half, and had succeeded in drawing out with red lines and blue figures the table which he showed her. "If I can do that, it will be pretty well; won't it?"
I imagine that it probably was not too different from what classics students do in the UK today (or was it?). But I'm not a classics student, and not from the UK, so I'd like to hear from others what the experience is.
As an aside, Anthony Trollope considered his schooldays a total waste, but taught himself Latin in later life, and considered himself fluent. Details are in his autobiography.