. This
is, to say the least, a paradoxical position for a language teacher. If
it is mere drill that is wanted, a very small corner of one language
would suffice. The teacher and the pupil alike are placed between the
two stools--interpretation and drill. A new generation of teachers must
arise to attain the dexterity requisite for the task.

Professor Blackie's concession is of no small importance in the actual
situation. "No one is to receive a full degree without showing a fair
proficiency in two foreign languages, one ancient and one modern, with
free option." This would almost satisfy the present demand everywhere,
and for some time to come.

[ARGUMENT FROM RESULTS.]

The article of Professor Bonamy Price is conceived in even a higher
strain than the other. There is so far a method of argumentation in it
that the case is laid out under four distinct heads, but there is no
decisive separation of reasons; many of the things said under one head
might easily be transferred without the sense of dislocation to any
other head. The writer indulges in high-flown rhetorical assertions
rather than in specific facts and arguments. The first merit of classics
is that "they are languages; not particular sciences, nor definite
branches of knowledge, but literatures". Under this head we have such
glowing sentences as these: "Think of the many elements of thought a boy
comes in contact with when he reads Caesar and Tacitus in succession,
Herodotus and Homer, Thucydides and Aristotle". "See what is implied in
having read Homer intelligently through, or Thucydides or Demosthenes;
what light will have been shed on the essence and laws of human
existence, on political society, on the relations of man to man, on
human nature itself." There are various conceivable ways of
counter-arguing these assertions, but the shortest is to call for the
facts--the results upon the many thousands that have passed through
their ten years of classical drill. Professor Campbell of St. Andrews,
once remarked, with reference to the value of Greek in particular, that
the question would have to be ultimately decided by the inner
consciousness of those that have undergone the study. To this we are
entitled to add, their powers as manifested to the world, of which
powers spectators can be the judges. When, with a few brilliant
exceptions, we discover nothing at all remarkable in the men that have
been subjected to the classical training, we may consider it