value. The speeches in Thucydides; the Rhetoric, Ethics, and Politics of Aristotle; the Dialogues of Plato; the Orations of Demosthenes; the Satires and especially the Epistles of Horace ; all the writings of Tacitus; the great work of Quintilian, a repertory of the best thoughts of the ancient world on all subjects connected with education; and in a less formal manner all that is left us of the ancient historians, orators, philosophers, and even dramatists,—are replete with remarks and maxims of singular good sense and penetration, applicable both to political and private life." Of these, it may be remarked here that Quintilian never fails to surprise the few-and there are comparatively few, including professional scholars-the few who read more than the famous first chapter of the tenth book; and the distinguished thinker just quoted bears emphatic testimony to the effect produced on his youthful mind by the perusal of the Institutions, and says that he "retained through life many valuable ideas" which he traced distinctly to his reading of him at an early age. We have known mature men of fine intellect and ripe judgment to be astonished and fascinated by the political insight of Thucydides when they returned to him after a long interval; and Arnold was right when he remarked that the portion of history dealt with by Thucydides is only ancient in the sense that the events related happened a long while ago. "If the reader of the newspaper," says Mr. Crawley, in the preface to his spirited rendering of Thucydides, "will condescend to cast an eye on my translation, he will find there the prototypes of many of the figures to which he is accustomed in his favorite. journal. He will discover the political freedom which he glories in, and the social liberty which he sometimes sighs for, in full operation at Athens; factions as fierce as those of the Versaillais and Communists at Corcyra; and in the 'best men' of the Four Hundred, oligarchs as self-seeking and unpatriotic as the gens du bien of the 'Figaro.' . . . In short, besides the practical lessons to be drawn for his own conduct, he will enjoy the philosophic pleasure of observing how the nature of man, in spite of all change of time and circumstance, remains essentially the same, and how short is the distance from the civilized inhabitant of Athens or Corinth to the dweller in London or Vienna."

It may not be safe to insist on the value of the ancients as types of literary excellence, or to enlarge on the powerful influence of their perfect and finished diction. The value is great and the influence healthy; but, unfortunately, artistic, power and the appreciation of art do not always go together, and the classic training of the majority of authors has actually brought the stylistic usefulness of the ancients into discredit in the eyes of those who do not reflect that good models are not every thing, nor even an appreciation of good models. So Mark Pattison, in his clever essay, "Books and Critics," in the Fortnightly Review for November, 1877, says: "It is one of the paradoxes of literary history, that in this very country-Germany-which is the world's schoolmaster in learning the Greek and Latin languages, so little of the style and beauty of these immortal models passes into their literature;" and Mr. Spencer cites among his examples of the disproportion of results and appliances the case of commentators of the classics, "who are among the most slovenly writers of English," and asks whether the self-made Cobbett would be guilty of the awkwardnesses of a Queen's speech, or the ploughman Burns or Bunyan the tinker blunder in his diction like the head-master of Winchester or some English bishop whom he cites. The question is a question of faculty, not of training alone; and it is not fair to pick out the exceptional men of genius whose education has not brought them into direct contact with ancient literature, and hold them up in triumphant contrast with those to whom nature has denied, not the susceptibility of form, but the power of classic reproduction. It is certainly claiming too much for the classics to attribute to them the creation of artistic faculty. It is enough to assert their moulding influence when the artistic faculty is there; and it is hardly worth while to notice the theory which has actually been advanced that the slovenly style of the literary class in Germany is due to their excessive study of Greek. So far as the decline of English among scholars is concerned, the large infusion of German in certain leading English journals has much more to do with it than any thing else.'

1 From the purely stylistic point of view, it is a pity that most of our American philologians, having been trained, if not in Germany, yet under German

The leisurely care with which the foremost men of antique literature elaborated their great works enabled them to attain an artistic perfection which will remain an eternal norm,' and the lover of the antique might maintain that they are as unapproachable here as they are confessedly in plastic art. But there the domination of the Greeks is a commonplace. If they made poor work, as Littrow says, of counting the stars even with their clear heavens and the sweep of a wider sky, they saw so clearly and reproduced so wonderfully the play of masculine muscle and the sinuous lines of female beauty, that there have been found men to maintain that such perfection was impossible without regular anatomical studies. It is bewildering to think what their art must have been when the mere mechanical repetition of it in a little Oscan town fills the world with wonder, when the shovel and the pick are revealing every day in obscure corners of classic ground the evidence of a wealth that staggers our imagination. We need not resort to the unearthed glories of Olympia, where we might expect to find the noblest treasures of Greek art. Go to Tanagra. Where is Tanagra? It is a poor town in Eastern Boeotia, and is remembered by the Greek scholar chiefly because of Corinna, by the Greek antiquary because of a famous breed of fighting-cocks,

influences, should be so prone to neglect philological work that is done in France. It is a gratuitous assumption that all Frenchmen are superficial; all can learn from the French, not only in methods of presentation, but in delicate analysis of social conditions, personal character, literary style; and many a French étude conveys under a graceful and popular form suggestions of wide scope and deep significance,

1In a recent critique on George Sand, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, M. d'Haussonville, no blind admirer of the great author whom he is reviewing, says: "Rien ne dure en effet que ce qui est bien composé. Si les formes vieillissent, si les idées changent, les lois de la composition sont éternelles ; l'esprit humain, mobile dans ses goûts, est toujours constant dans ses procédés. Les opérations de la logique sont les mêmes aujourd'hui qu'au temps d'Aristote, et les préceptes de rhétorique, qui ont cours dans nos écoles ne diffèrent pas de ceux que la jeunesse studieuse recueillait autrefois sous les portiques d'Athènes et de Rome. Celui qui se fait un jeu de ces préceptes et qui ne sait discerner l'éternelle vérité des lois cachées sur leurs formules arides pourra peut-être surprendre un succès d'un jour: mais il s'exposera à voir couler tôt ou tard sa réputation fragile, comme un édifice dont l'architecte aurait embelli la façade sans en asseoir la base d'après les lois de l'équilibre géometrique."

by the Greek historian because of a battle fought in the neighborhood. Strike into the soil, open the tombs of the dead, and you bring to light thousands of statuettes which breathe the infinite charis of Greekdom; and it is said by experts that a new era of "art-industry "-as our German-English has it—is to begin with this find of terra-cottas in a miserable third-rate town of Boeotia, that Boeotia which we have been taught by the quick-witted Athenians to laugh at. It hardly seems quite safe to laugh at the Boeotians.'

Inevitable, then, as part and parcel of our own civilization, indispensable as exemplars in those lines of achievement which are peculiarly their own, the ancient classics furnish us, besides all this, with the best gymnasium for the exercise of the mental faculties, as well as the finest theatre for the culture of æsthetic appreciation. But it would be impossible, within the compass of a single essay, even to review the arguments in favor of the disciplinary value of the classics and the classic languages of antiquity; and it is the opinion of the writer that this has been made, if any thing, too prominent in the discussion. At all events, if it can be shown that the classics have an intrinsic value of their own, it will be unnecessary to defend what has been called by an assailant of the classics "the wasteful policy of a vicarious discipline." And here it may be noted that those who have insisted most eloquently on the expulsion of the classics from the curriculum, who would bid Greek make way for German and reduce Latin to the smallest possible modicum, are for the most part men who, themselves reared in the atmosphere of classical studies, cannot appreciate the extent to which they are indebted, directly or indirectly, to the very training they despise. The phraseology of our language was fixed by scholars, and in its higher ranges can only be extended by scholars, and if the control exercised by classical scholarship should be forever removed, our noble tongue would become a jangle of false notes or a rattling vulgarity of slang. Like those who tell us that we can now at last afford to dispense with religion, and who point to the noble lives led by men who yield no allegiance to Christianity or even to theistic princi

'Bergk, in his "Griechische Literaturgeschichte," i. 916, has some good remarks on the Boeotians in modification of current views.

ples, these eloquent denouncers of the classics forget that the one experiment as well as the other requires a vacuum, and that the vacuum is not yet; nor can we forecast the time when it will be possible to eliminate the classical influences that permeate every nook and corner of our intellectual domain. Until then it will be in vain to cite personal examples by way of proof that the highest results of modern culture can be attained without the classics; and it will be necessary for the advocates of the new education to make large concessions to the old models, or to throw themselves without reserve into the arms of a brutal materialism. There is really no other course; for it is evident that there is no better school of form than we find in the history, the literature, and the art of the Greeks.

Even Mr. Huxley, in his lecture at the Johns Hopkins University, had something to say in behalf of æsthetic culture, and although æstheticism is not the satisfying portion of man, as an immortal being, such a concession is something as a sign of the times; and it really seems as if some of the devotees of the new education, to use again a favorite phrase, were beginning to feel the danger of the utter breakdown of physical science itself, if the present narrow methods of study be persisted in. The cry of alarm has been raised by more than one voice in Germany. So in a discourse by Emil du BoisReymond, the well-known Berlin professor, a tissue of rhetorical generalities about the history of culture and natural science, there are some significant admissions which it may be well to notice. Since the late war with France, it is no secret that the land of scholars has lost much of its attraction in the eyes of scholars, because it has become so strong, so despotic. Brutal is a hard word, but the type of German materialism is the most brutal of all. In old times we might laugh at the provincialisms, the pettinesses, the local patriotisms, the narrower fatherlands, the kinglets and the princelets with their select society of subjects, the minuscule aulic councillors of pockethandkerchief dukedoms, the upper-court-chimney-sweepers of a microscopic Transparency, the cab-load which constituted the contingent of this or that impotent potentate to the Federal army; but the life of those days had a charm which the new