ltaneously--The
deterioration of knowledge through neglect--What it really is--The
only available knowledge that which we habitually use--Difficulty in
modern education--That it is inevitably a beginning of many things and
no more--The simpler education of an ancient Greek--That of
Alcibiades--How the Romans were situated as to this--The privilege of
limited studies belongs to the earlier ages--They learned and we
attempt to learn.

It appears to be henceforth inevitable that men should be unable to
restrict themselves to one or two pursuits, and you who are in most
respects a very perfect specimen of what the age naturally produces in
the way of culture, have studied subjects so many and so various that a
mere catalogue of them would astonish your grandfather if his shade
could revisit his old home. And yet your grandfather was considered a
very highly cultivated gentleman according to the ideas and requirements
of his time. He was an elegant scholar, but in Latin chiefly, for he
said that he never read Greek easily, and indeed he abandoned that
language entirely on leaving the University. But his Latin, from daily
use and practice (for he let no day slip by without reading some ancient
author) and from the thoroughness and accuracy of his scholarship, was
always as ready for service as the saddled steeds of Branksome. I think
he got more culture, more of the best effects of good literature, out of
that one language than some polyglots get out of a dozen. He knew no
modern tongue, he had not even the common pretension to read a little
French, and in his day hardly anybody studied German. He had no
scientific training of any kind except mathematics, in which I have
heard him say that he had never been proficient. Of the fine arts his
ignorance was complete, so complete that I doubt if he could have
distinguished Rigaud from Reynolds, and he had never played upon any
musical instrument. The leisure which he enjoyed during a long and
tranquil existence he gave entirely to Latin and English literature, but
of the two he enjoyed Latin the more, not with the preference of a
pedant, but because it carried him more completely out of the present,
and gave him the refreshment of a more perfect change. He produced on
all who knew him the impression of a cultivated gentleman, which he was.

There is only an interval of one generation between you and that good
Latinist, but how wide is the difference in your intellec