still; but
this is one of the illusions of scholarship. In each country Latin
scholars have adopted a conventional style of reading, and the sounds
which are in conformity with that style seem to them to be musical,
whilst other than the accepted sounds seem ridiculous, and grate harshly
on the unaccustomed ear. The music which the Englishman hears, or
imagines that he hears, in the language of ancient Rome, is certainly
not the music which the Roman authors intended to note in words. It is
as if my Frenchman, having read "Claribel" in his own way, had affirmed
that he heard the music of the verse. If he heard music at all, it was
not Tennyson's.

Permit me to add a few observations about sense. My French friend
certainly understood English in a very remarkable manner for a student
who had never visited our country; he knew the dictionary meaning of
every word he encountered, and yet there ever remained between him and
our English tongue a barrier or wall of separation, hard to define, but
easy to perceive. In the true deep sense he never understood the
language. He studied it, laid regular siege to it, mastered it to all
appearance, yet remained, to the end, outside of it. His observations,
and especially his unfavorable criticisms, proved this quite
conclusively. Expressions often appeared to him faulty, in which no
English reader would see anything to remark upon; it may be added that
(by way of compensation) he was unable to appreciate the oddity of those
intentionally quaint turns of expression which are invented by the craft
of humorists. It may even be doubted whether his English was of any
ascertainable use to him. He might probably have come as near to an
understanding of our authors by the help of translations, and he could
not converse in English, for the spoken language was entirely
unintelligible to him. An acquisition of this kind seems scarcely an
adequate reward for the labor that it costs. Compared with living
Englishmen my French friend was nowhere, but if English had been a dead
language, he would have been looked up to as a very eminent scholar, and
would have occupied a professor's chair in the university.

A little more life might be given to the study of Latin by making it a
spoken language. Boys might be taught to speak Latin in their schooldays
with the modern Roman pronunciation, which, though probably a deviation
from the ancient, is certainly nearer to it than our own. If colloquial
Latin