Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/381

Rh much the same thing for the boy, I freely admit; but the mass of mankind when they read are casual readers, and the casual reader does not use a dictionary.

IX. How the Classics should be taught.

Professor Hill's views on the teaching of the classics, and his strictures on certain proposed innovations, seem to me eminently sound. He has probably not heard of sundry American proposals to "enrich" the study of the classics, though the greatest enrichment would be to restore prose composition to its old place of importance. The indispensable value of the classics is the concentrated effort required in construing and writing them, the piecing-out of the English-classic language puzzle: this, and the finger in the dictionary, constitute the values that a modern language or the native speech will never—I do not say, can never, save in so far as what will not be can not be—replace. Whatever "enrichment" impairs these values is like a drug that would sap the heart while making the hair grow. It is abundantly right to say, with Professor Hill:

X. On the Relation of Language to Thought.

We know little indeed of the psychology of language—which leaves us perhaps in little worse case than when we stand before the