Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/659

Rh Granted that the boy left to himself would go more rapidly through Burke than through Thucydides, might not his pace be arrested by a well-directed cross-examination; with this advantage, that the length of attention might be graduated according to the importance of the subject, and not according to the accidental difficulty of the language?

The Professor boldly grapples with the alleged waste of time in classics, and urges that "the gain may be measured by the time expended," which is very like begging the question.

One advantage adduced under this head deserves notice. The languages being dead, as well as all the societies and interests that they represent, they do not excite the prejudices and the passions of modern life. This, however, may need some qualification. Grote wrote his history of Greece to counterwork the party bias of Mitford. The battles of despotism, oligarchy, and democracy are to this hour fought over the dead bodies of Greece and Rome. If the Professor meant to insinuate that those that have gone through the classical training are less violent as partisans, more dispassionate in political judgments, than the rest of mankind, we can only say that we should not have known this from our actual experience. The discovery of some sweet, oblivious antidote to party feeling seems, as far as we can judge, to be still in the future. If we want studies that will, while they last, thoroughly divert the mind from the prejudices of party, science is even better than ancient history; there are no party cries connected with the Binomial Theorem.

The Professor's last branch of argument, I am obliged with all deference to say, contains no argument at all. It is that, in classical education, a close contact is established between the mind of the boy. and the mind of the master. He does not even attempt to show how the effect is peculiar to classical teaching. The whole of this part of the paper is, in fact, addressed, by way of remonstrance, to the writer's own friends, the classical teachers. He reproaches them for their inefficiency, for their not being Arnolds. It is not my business to interfere between him and them in this matter. So much stress does he lay upon the teacher's part in the work, that I almost expected the admission that a good teacher in English, German, natural history, political economy, might even be preferable to a bad teacher of Latin and Greek.

The recent Oxford contest has brought out the eminent oratorical powers of Canon Liddon; and we have some curiosity in noting his contributions to the classical side. I refer to his letter in the "Times." The gist of his advocacy of Greek is contained in the following allegations: First, the present system enables a man to recur with profit and advantage to Greek literature. To this it has been often replied, that by far the greater number are too little familiarized with the