age of
the boys who are tormented with it really learn it. Only a still smaller
percentage can read it after they are thirty. Only one or two gain any
material advantage by it. In very truth, most minds are not framed by
nature to excel and to delight in literature, and only to such minds and
to schoolmasters is Greek valuable.

This is the case against Greek put as powerfully as one can state it. On
the other side, we may say, though the remark may seem absurd at first
sight, that to have mastered Greek, even if you forget it, is not to have
wasted time. It really is an educational and mental discipline. The
study is so severe that it needs the earnest application of the mind. The
study is averse to indolent intellectual ways; it will not put up with a
"there or thereabouts," any more than mathematical ideas admit of being
made to seem "extremely plausible." He who writes, and who may venture
to offer himself as an example, is naturally of a most slovenly and
slatternly mental habit. It is his constant temptation to "scamp" every
kind of work, and to say "it will do well enough." He hates taking
trouble and verifying references. And he can honestly confess that
nothing in his experience has so helped, in a certain degree, to
counteract those tendencies--as the labour of thoroughly learning certain
Greek texts--the dramatists, Thucydides, some of the books of Aristotle.
Experience has satisfied him that Greek is of real educational value,
and, apart from the acknowledged and unsurpassed merit of its literature,
is a severe and logical training of the mind. The mental constitution is
strengthened and braced by the labour, even if the language is forgotten
in later life.

It is manifest, however, that this part of education is not for
everybody. The real educational problem is to discover what boys Greek
will be good for, and what boys will only waste time and dawdle over it.
Certainly to men of a literary turn (a very minute percentage), Greek is
of an inestimable value. Great poets, even, may be ignorant of it, as
Shakespeare probably was, as Keats and Scott certainly were, as Alexandre
Dumas was. But Dumas regretted his ignorance; Scott regretted it. We
know not how much Scott's admitted laxity of style and hurried careless
habit might have been modified by a knowledge of Greek; how much of
grace, permanence, and generally of art, his genius might have gained
from the language and literature of Hellas.