ll modern languages are dull,
ill-contrived, and barbarous." He thought that even the most accomplished
of modern writers might still be glad to "borrow descriptive power from
Tacitus; dignified perspicuity from Livy; simplicity from Caesar; and from
Homer some portion of that light and heat which, dispersed into ten
thousand channels, has filled the world with bright images and illustrious
thoughts. Let the cultivator of modern literature addict himself to the
purest models of taste which France, Italy, and England could supply--he
might still learn from Virgil to be majestic, and from Tibullus to be
tender; he might not yet look upon the face of nature as Theocritus saw it;
nor might he reach those springs of pathos with which Euripides softened
the hearts of his audience."

This sound appreciation of what was best in classical literature was
accompanied in Sydney Smith by the most outspoken contempt for the way in
which Greek and Latin are taught in Public Schools. He thought that
schoolmasters encouraged their pupils to "love the instrument better than
the end--not the luxury which the difficulty encloses, but the
difficulty--not the filbert, but the shell--not what may be read in Greek,
but Greek itself?"

"We think that, in order to secure an attention to Homer and Virgil, we
must catch up every man, whether he is to be a clergyman or a duke,
begin with him at six years of age, and never quit him till he is
twenty; making him conjugate and decline for life and death; and so
teaching him to estimate his progress in real wisdom as he can scan
the verses of the Greek Tragedians."

He desired that boys should obtain a quick and easy mastery over the
authors whom they had to read, and on this account he urged that they
should be taught by the use of literal and interlinear translations; but "a
literal translation, or any translation, of a school-book is a contraband
article in English schools, which a schoolmaster would instantly seize, as
a custom-house officer would seize a barrel of gin."

Grammar, gerund-grinding, the tyranny of the Lexicon and the Dictionary,
had got the schoolboys of England in their grasp, and the boy "was
suffocated with the nonsense of grammarians, overwhelmed with every species
of difficulty disproportionate to his age, and driven by despair to pegtop
or marbles"; while the British Parent stood and spoke thus with himself:--

"Have I read through Lilly? Have I