hey gang in stirks, and come out asses,
Plain truth to speak;
An' syne they think to climb Parnassus
By dint o' Greek!_"

It was the influence of caste that made Burns write in this way, and how
unjust it was every modern reader knows. The great majority of poets
have been well-educated men, and instead of ganging into college like
stirks and coming out like asses, they have, as a rule, improved their
poetic faculty by an acquaintance with the masterpieces of their art.
Yet Burns is not to be blamed for this injustice; he sneered at Greek
because Greek was the mark of a disdainful and exclusive caste, but he
never sneered at French or Italian. He had no soreness against culture
for its own sake; it was the pride of caste that galled him.

How surely the wonderful class-instinct guided the aristocracy to the
kind of learning likely to be the most effectual barrier against
fellowship with the mercantile classes and the people! The uselessness
of Greek in industry and commerce was a guarantee that those who had to
earn their bread would never find time to master it, and even the
strange difficult look of the alphabet (though in reality the alphabet
was a gate of gossamer), ensured a degree of awful veneration for those
initiated into its mysteries. Then the habit our forefathers had of
quoting Latin and Greek to keep the ignorant in their places, was a
strong defensive weapon of their caste, and they used it without
scruple. Every year removes this passion for exclusiveness farther and
farther into the past; every year makes learning of every kind less
available as the armor of a class, and less to be relied upon as a means
of social advancement and consideration. Indeed, we have already reached
a condition which is drawing back many members of the aristocracy to a
state of feeling about intellectual culture resembling that of their
forefathers in the middle ages. The old barbarian feeling has revived of
late, a feeling which (if it were self-conscious enough) might find
expression in some such words as these:--

"It is not by learning and genius that we can hold the highest place,
but by the dazzling exhibition of external splendor in those costly
pleasures which are the plainest evidence of our power. Let us have
beautiful equipages on the land, beautiful yachts upon the sea; let our
recreations be public and expensive, that the people may not easily lose
sight of us, and may know that