o acquire an ancient language too imperfectly for it to
be useful--Dr. Arnold--Mature life leaves little time for
culture--Modern indifference to ancient thinking--Larger experience of
the moderns--The moderns older than the ancients--The Author's regret
that Latin has ceased to be a living language--The shortest way to
learn to read a language--The recent interest in modern languages--A
French student of Hebrew.

I was happy to learn your opinion of the reform so recently introduced
by the Minister of Public Instruction, and the more so that I was glad
to find the views of so inexperienced a person as myself confirmed by
your wider knowledge. You went even farther than M. Jules Simon, for you
openly expressed a desire for the complete withdrawal of Greek from the
ordinary school curriculum. Not that you undervalue Greek,--no one of
your scholarship would be likely to undervalue a great literature,--but
you thought it a loss of time to acquire a language so imperfectly that
the literature still remained practically closed whilst thousands of
valuable hours had been wasted on the details of grammar. The truth is,
that although the principle of beginning many things in school education
with the idea that the pupil will in maturer life pursue them to fuller
accomplishment may in some instances be justified by the prolonged
studies of men who have a natural taste for erudition, it is idle to
shut one's eyes to the fact that most men have no inclination for
school-work after they have left school, and if they had the inclination
they have not the time. Our own Dr. Arnold, the model English
schoolmaster, said, "It is so hard to begin anything in after-life, and
so comparatively easy to continue what has been begun, that I think we
are bound to break ground, as it were, into several of the mines of
knowledge with our pupils; that the first difficulties may be overcome
by them whilst there is yet a power from without to aid their own
faltering resolution, and that so they may be enabled, if they will, to
go on with the study hereafter." The principle here expressed is no
doubt one of the important principles of all early education, and yet I
think that it cannot be safely followed without taking account of human
nature, such as it is. Everything hangs on that little parenthesis "if
they will." And if they will _not_, how then? The time spent in breaking
the ground has been wasted, except so far as the exercise of bre