rather than in specific facts and arguments.  The first merit of classics is that “they are languages; not particular sciences, nor definite branches of knowledge, but literatures”.  Under this head we have such glowing sentences as these:  “Think of the many elements of thought a boy comes in contact with when he reads Caesar and Tacitus in succession, Herodotus and Homer, Thucydides and Aristotle”.  “See what is implied in having read Homer intelligently through, or Thucydides or Demosthenes; what light will have been shed on the essence and laws of human existence, on political society, on the relations of man to man, on human nature itself.”  There are various conceivable ways of counter-arguing these assertions, but the shortest is to call for the facts—­the results upon the many thousands that have passed through their ten years of classical drill.  Professor Campbell of St. Andrews, once remarked, with reference to the value of Greek in particular, that the question would have to be ultimately decided by the inner consciousness of those that have undergone the study.  To this we are entitled to add, their powers as manifested to the world, of which powers spectators can be the judges.  When, with a few brilliant exceptions, we discover nothing at all remarkable in the men that have been subjected to the classical training, we may consider it as almost a waste of time to analyse the grandiloquent assertions of Mr. Bonamy Price.  But if we were to analyse them, we should find that boys never read Caesar and Tacitus through in succession; still less Thucydides Demosthenes, and Aristotle; that very few men read and understand these writers; that the shortest way to come into contact with Aristotle is to avoid his Greek altogether, and take his expositors and translators in the modern languages.

The professor is not insensible to the reproach that the vaunted classical education has been a failure, as compared with these splendid promises.  He says, however, that though many have failed to become classical scholars in the full sense of the word, “it does not follow that they have gained nothing from their study of Greek and Latin; just the contrary is the truth”.  The “contrary” must mean that they have gained something; which something is stated to be “the extent to which the faculties of the boy have been developed, the quantity of impalpable but not less real attainments he has achieved, and his general readiness for life, and for action as a man”.  But it is becoming more and more difficult to induce people to spend a long course of youthful years upon a confessedly impalpable result.  We might give up a few months to a speculative and doubtful good, but we need palpable consequences to show for our years spent on classics.  Next comes the admission that the teaching is often bad.  But why should the teaching be so bad, and what is the hope of making it better?  Then we are told that science by itself leaves the largest and most important portion of the youths’ nature absolutely undeveloped.  But, in the first place, it is not proposed to reduce the school and college curriculum to science alone; and, in the next place, who can say what are the “impalpable” results of science?