.

Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin and
Greek. We were taught very badly because the men who taught us did not
habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them any more
now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine monasteries. At the
utmost our men read them. We were taught these languages because long
ago Latin had been the language of civilisation; the one way of escape
from the narrow and localised life had lain in those days through Latin,
and afterwards Greek had come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and
amazing ideas. Once these two languages had been the sole means of
initiation to the detached criticism and partial comprehension of the
world. I can imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and
Roper, teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive
Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily,
impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely, patriotically,
because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the irresistible
stimulus to a new phase of history. That was long ago. A new great
world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school, had assimilated
all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on to new and yet more
amazing developments of its own. But the City Merchants School still
made the substance of its teaching Latin and Greek, still, with no
thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream amidst the harvesting.

There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went up
to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of our
curriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted that it was
impossible to write good English without an illuminating knowledge of
the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and failed to button up
a sentence in saying so. His main argument conceded every objection
a reasonable person could make to the City Merchants' curriculum. He
admitted that translation had now placed all the wisdom of the past at
a common man's disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remained
in which modern work had not long since passed beyond the ancient
achievement. He disclaimed any utility. But there was, he said, a
peculiar magic in these grammatical exercises no other subjects of
instruction possessed. Nothing else provided the same strengthening and
orderly discipline for the mind.

He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senio