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 highest office is to influence the character, to chasten the judgment, to illumine the understanding, and, in a word, to render their disciples more truly humane. But, in order that they should produce these effects, it is necessary that they should be approached in a spirit more comprehensive than that of the specialist who confines himself to one small part of them, and comparatively ignores the rest. It is better—for most minds at any rate—to renounce the hope of an exhaustive acquaintance with any one corner of the field, than to miss the largest benefits which the entire discipline can confer. This is what, under the conditions of modern scholarship, we are perhaps too apt to forget. But, if the study of the Greek language were to be spread over a wider area, and if a more popular interest in the classics were to spring from it, the academic tendency towards excessive specialising would be gradually tempered by more popular instincts; the classics would be, so far, recalled to their paramount function as "Humanities"; in this sense, and to this extent, the intellectual pleasures tasted by the scholars of the Renaissance would be enjoyed anew by large numbers among us, to whom the charm of Greek literature, inseparable as it is from that of the Greek language, would come with all the joy of a discovery.

But even this is not the largest issue involved. That eager acceptance of stimulating lectures on the classics which has been manifested at several great centres of population is only one symptom, though a most remarkable one, of a growing desire to know