Dear Herbert,—­I declare that the greatest sin there is in the world is stupidity.  The character that does more harm in the world than any other is the character in which stupidity and virtue are combined.  I grow every day more despondent about the education we give at our so-called classical schools.  Here, you know, we are severely classical; and to have to administer such a system is often more than I can bear with dignity or philosophy.  One sees arrive here every year a lot of brisk, healthy boys, with fair intelligence, and quite disposed to work; and at the other end one sees depart a corresponding set of young gentlemen who know nothing, and can do nothing, and are profoundly cynical about all intellectual things.  And this is the result of the meal of chaff we serve out to them week after week; we collect it, we chop it up, we tie it up in packets; we spend hours administering it in teaspoons, and this is the end.  I am myself the victim of this kind of education; I began Latin at seven and Greek at nine, and, when I left Cambridge, I did not know either of them well.  I could not sit in an arm-chair and read either a Greek or a Latin book, and I had no desire to do it.  I knew a very little French, a very little mathematics, a very little science; I knew no history, no German, no Italian.  I knew nothing of art or music; my ideas of geography were childish.  And yet I am decidedly literary in my tastes, and had read a lot of English for myself.  It is nothing short of infamous that any one should, after an elaborate education, have been so grossly uneducated.  My only accomplishment was the writing of rather pretty Latin verse.

And yet this preposterous system continues year after year.  I had an animated argument with some of the best of my colleagues the other day about it.  I cannot tell you how profoundly irritating these wiseacres were.  They said all the stock things—­that one must lay a foundation, and that it could only be laid by using the best literatures; that Latin was essential because it lay at the root of so many other languages; and Greek, because there the human intellect had reached its high-water mark,—­“and it has such a noble grammar,” one enthusiastic Grecian said; that an active-minded person could do all the rest for himself.  It was in vain to urge that in many cases the whole foundation was insecure; and that all desire to raise a superstructure was eliminated.  My own belief is that Greek and Latin are things to be led up to, not begun with; that they are hard, high literatures, which require an initiation to comprehend; and that one ought to go backwards in education, beginning with what one knows.

It seems to me, to use a similitude, that the case is thus.  If one lives in a plain and wishes to reach a point upon a hill, one must make a road from the plain upwards.  It will be a road at the base, it will be a track higher up, and a path at last, used only by those who have business there.  But the classical theorists seem to me to make an elaborate section of macadamised road high in the hills, and, having made it, to say that the people who like can make their own road in between.