cient languages, soon gives acuteness and
promotes the understanding of all intellectual culture, and the mass of
the foreign materials of language is an excellent strengthener of the
memory.

Still more invigorating is the purport conveyed from that distant world
that was now disclosed to the learner. Still does a very great portion
of our intellectual riches descend from antiquity. He who would rightly
understand what works around and in him, and has perhaps long been the
common property of all classes of the people, must rise up to the
source; and an acquaintance with a great unfettered national life, and
a comprehension of some of the laws of life, its beauties and its
limitations, give a freedom to the judgment upon the condition of the
present which nothing else can supply. He whose soul has been warmed by
the Dialogues of Plato, must look down with contempt on the bigotry of
the monks; and he who has read with advantage the "Antigone" in the
ancient language, will lay aside the "Sonnenjungfrau" with justifiable
indifference.

But most important of all was the peculiar method of learning at the
Latin schools and universities. It is not by the unthinking reception
of the material presented to them, but their minds are awakened by
their own investigations and researches. In the higher classes of the
gymnasiums, and at the universities, the students became the intimates
of earnest scholars. It was just the disputed questions which most
stirred them: the inquiries still unanswered, and which most powerfully
exercised the mind, were those which they most loved to impart. Thus
the youth penetrated as free investigator into the very centre of life,
and, however far his later vocation might remove him from these
investigations, he had received the highest knowledge, and attained to
the greatest results of the time; and for the rest of his life was
capable of forming a judgment on the greatest questions of science and
faith, by accepting or rejecting all the new materials and points of
view which he had gained. That these schools of learning made little
preparation for practical life, was no tenable complaint. The merchant
who took his sons from the university to the counting-house, soon
discovered that they had not learnt much with which younger apprentices
were conversant, but that they generally repaired the deficiency with
the greatest facility.

About 1790, this method of culture had attained so much value and
imp