Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 19.djvu/42

32 their text-books, and their teachers. I know of no institution in America where this change is even attempted, of none where they are taught except as accomplishments. Nor is it apparent how they could be so taught with any existing instrumentalities. A man may speak a dozen dialects as fluently as a European courier, and yet know as little as the courier knows of the principles of language. Whereas it is impossible for any boy to have faithfully learned the simplest manual of Latin or Greek grammar without having laid some foundation for systematic philology.

And as for the literary value of these languages, I will go still further, and with especial reference to that which there is most disposition to banish from use, the Greek. It certainly is not a hasty or boyish judgment on my part, nor yet one in which pedantry or servility can have much to do, when I deliberately avow the belief that the Greek literature is still so entirely unequalled among the accumulated memorials of the world, that it seems to differ from all others in kind rather than in degree, and that even a very superficial knowledge of it is worth much. In writing this, I am thinking less of Plato than of Homer, and not more of Plomer than of the dramatic and lyric poets. So far from the knowledge of other literatures tending to depreciate the Greek, it seems to me that no one can adequately value this who has not come back to it after long study of the others. Ampère, that master of French prose, has hardly overstated the truth when he says that the man best versed in all other books must say, after all, in returning to a volume of Homer or Sophocles,— "Here is beauty, true and sovereign ; its like was never written among men, — Voilà la beautié véritable ct souveraine j jamais it ne s'est cent run de pareil ekes les homines”  I do not see how there could possibly be a list of the dozen masterpieces of the world’s literature, of which at least one half should not be Greek. And, indeed, when one considers the mere vehicle, the language itself, one must remember that there is no more possibility of arbitrary choice in languages than in stones; and Greek, the native tongue of sculptors, is the only tongue that has the texture of marble.

Perhaps every man of studious habits, growing occasionally impatient of the healthful practical duties which American life involves, has his own whim as to his imaginary employments in case illness or other interference should deny him even the action of the pen, and throw him entirely upon books. I can remember a time, for one, when the State prison would have looked rather alluring to me, if it had guaranteed a copy of the Mécanique Céleste, with full leisure to read it. But foremost among such fantastic attractions are those which obtained actual control over that English clergyman, described in Hogg’s Life of Shelley, who had for his one sole aim in existence the reiterated perusal of a three years’ course of Greek books. He had no family, scarcely any professional duties, a moderate income, and perfect health. He took his three meals a day and his two short walks; and all the rest of his waking hours, for thirty years,he gave to Greek. No; he read a newspaper once a week, and two or three times a year he read a few pages of Virgil and Cicero, just to satisfy himself that it was a waste of time for a man who could read Greek to read their writings. On Sunday he read the Septuagint and the New Testament. From his three years’ course of authors he never deviated; when they were ended, he began again. The only exception was Homer, whose works were read every year during a summer vacation of a month at the sea-shore, — “the proper place to read Homer,” he said. “I read a book of the Iliad every day before dinner, and a book of the Odyssey daily after dinner. In a month there are twenty-four week-days; there being twenty-four books in each poem, it just does it..... I throw in the Hymns, — there are commonly two or