ek and Latin? Once more, the
_teaching_ of any language must be very imperfect, if it brings about
habitually such situations of difficulty as are here described.

[ARGUMENTS FOR CLASSICS.]

The professor relapses into a cooler and correcter strain when he
remarks that the pupil's mind is necessarily more delayed over the
expression of a thought in a foreign language (whether dead or alive
matters not), and therefore remembers the meaning better. Here, however,
the desiderated reform of teaching might come into play. Granted that
the boy left to himself would go more rapidly through Burke than through
Thucydides, might not his pace be retarded by a well-directed
cross-examination; with this advantage, that the length of attention
might be graduated according to the importance of the subject, and not
according to the accidental difficulty of the language?

The professor boldly grapples with the alleged waste of time in
classics, and urges that "the gain may be measured by the time
expended," which is very like begging the question.

One advantage adduced under this head deserves notice. The languages
being dead, as well as all the societies and interests that they
represent, they do not excite the prejudices and passions of modern
life. This, however, may need some qualification. Grote wrote his
history of Greece to counterwork the party bias of Mitford. The battles
of despotism, oligarchy, and democracy are to this hour fought over the
dead bodies of Greece and Rome. If the professor meant to insinuate,
that those that have gone through the classical training are less
violent as partisans, more dispassionate in political judgments, than
the rest of mankind, we can only say that we should not have known this
from our actual experience. The discovery of some sweet, oblivious,
antidote to party feeling seems, as far as we can judge, to be still in
the future. If we want studies that will, while they last, thoroughly
divert the mind from the prejudices of party, science is even better
than ancient history; there are no party cries connected with the
Binomial Theorem.

The professor's last branch of argument, I am obliged, with all
deference, to say, contains no argument at all. It is that, in classical
education, a close contact is established between the mind of the boy
and the mind of the master. He does not even attempt to show how the
effect is peculiar to classical teaching. The whole of this part of the
paper is