Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/93

Rh a liberal education—the central source of "sweetness and light." These gods of Greece and Rome, having played their part, still "lag superfluous on the stage," and we must push them from their places to make room for something better—for modern languages and physical sciences. It may be said there is room for all, but I doubt it. Many eminent teachers in America and in England, writing to me in regard to a prize paper on "Hamlet," printed last year as a specimen of the work done by my pupils, use expressions of surprise and admiration that have astonished me, and confess that they are unable to do work so good on account of the over-crowded curriculums of their colleges and universities. From numerous statements of this kind, I infer that, although able and learned men are employed in the department of English in our leading institutions, the students do not have time for any real, earnest work at English. There is too much of something else. We must find this encumbering something and drive it out, to make room for English. I think I see it in the form of Latin and Greek, and abstract mathematics in some colleges. Like the men of Ephesus who shouted "Great is Diana of the Ephesians" all the louder because they no longer believed in her greatness, we sometimes cling the closer to our idols after we see their utter powerlessness. So I have done, and in the curriculum of Logan Female College I permitted Latin to hold the place of honor after I had lost faith in its right. Meanwhile I was giving the primacy to the study of English in the actual work of the college. A copy of the college register having fallen into the hands of Mr. A. J. Ellis, formerly President of the English Philological Association and author of "Early English Pronunciation," he wrote me a long private letter, in which he severely criticises my inconsistency, and presses me to an open avowal of my real faith. I can best fortify the position I have taken by quoting his words, as I find them in a lecture before the London College of Preceptors: "It is perfectly absurd to speak of the humanizing effect of Latin and Greek, the grand literatures which they contain, their poetry, their philosophy, their history, the enormous influence which they have had upon the literature, poetry, philosophy, the whole tone of thought prevalent among civilized nations—I say that it is perfectly absurd to advance all these arguments, when the only condition which could make them valid is wanting. That condition is, that those who acquire them should be able to use them; that is, should be able to take up a Latin or Greek book, and read as most of those who have learned French and German would be ashamed not to do with French and German books; should be able rapidly by the eye to drink in the sense without the laborious consultation of dictionaries, without having to consider their own language at all; should be able to think in the languages so far as to speak and write in them with tolerable facility, making the words and phrases immediate representatives of thought. Without such power, we have no notion of the meaning or literature of a language. The words are tasks to get up,