nor any other upon any book which you have never read.  Tell me, what is your Tripos?’ He said ‘the History Tripos.’  ‘Then,’ said I, ’since History provides quite a large number of themes, choose one and I will try to correct your treatment of it, without offence to your opinions or prejudice to your facts.’  ‘But,’ he confessed, ’at So-and-so’—­naming the great Public School—­’we never wrote out an account of anything, or set down our opinions on anything, to be corrected.  We just construed and did sums:  And when he brought me his first attempt, behold, it was so.  He could not construct a simple sentence, let alone putting two sentences together; while, as for a paragraph, it lay beyond his farthest horizon.  In short, here was an instance ready to hand for any cheap writer engaged to decry the old Classical Education.

What would the old schoolmasters plead in excuse?  Why this, as I suggest—­’You cite an extreme instance.  But, while granting English Literature to be great, we would point out that an overwhelming majority of our best writers have modelled their prose and verse upon the Greek and Roman classics, either directly or through tradition.  Now we have our own language gratis, so to speak.  Let us spend our pains, then, in acquiring Latin and Greek, and the tradition.  So shall we most intimately enjoy our own authors; and so, if we wish to write, we shall have at hand the clues they followed, the models they used.’

Now I have as you know, Gentlemen, a certain sympathy with this plea, or with a part of it:  nor can so much of truth as its argument contains be silenced by a ‘What about Shakespeare?’ or a ‘What about Bunyan?’ or a ‘What about Burns?’ I believe our imaginary pleader for the Classics could put up a stout defence upon any of those names.  To choose the forlornest hope of the three, I can hear him demonstrating, to his own satisfaction if not to yours, that Bunyan took his style straight out of the Authorised Version of our Bible; which is to say that he took it from the styles of forty-seven scholars, plus Tyndale’s, plus Coverdale’s, plus Cranmer’s—­the scholarship of fifty scholars expressed and blended.

But, as a theory, the strict classical argument gives itself away, as well by its intolerance as by its obvious distrust of the genius of our own wonderful language.  I have in these five years, and from this place, Gentlemen, counselled you to seek back ever to those Mediterranean sources which are the well-heads of our civilisation:  but always (I hope) on the understanding that you use them with a large liberty.  They are effete for us unless we add and mingle freely the juice of our own natural genius.

And in practice the strict classical theory, with its implied contempt of English, has been disastrous:  disastrous not only with the ordinary man—­as with my Sixth Form boy who could not put two sentences together, and had read no English authors; but disastrous even to highly eminent scholars.  Listen, pray, to this passage from one of them, Frederick Paley, who condescended (Heaven knows why) to turn the majestic verse of Pindar into English Prose—­