ld not in
fact take place without altering the whole spirit of the teaching. If we
are to understand how this was we must keep in mind one of the chief
characteristics of what is called a classical education.

The study of the classics means the study of the whole life of the two
great nations of antiquity as preserved in the extant literature. Now
this does not contain a definite and formulated doctrine, it does not
even, as might be said of the Middle Ages, mean one attitude towards the
world; it opens to the student a field of extraordinary wealth and
variety, and from this each will take that which he is able to
appropriate. To one it may be the mysticism of the Cambridge Platonists,
to another the frank and pagan joy in life of Anacreon and Horace.
Rousseau and Grote will each in his own way appropriate the lesson of
Liberty, while others will turn to the story of the militant and
dominant aristocracy of Rome. Goethe and Keats, Milton and Gibbon,
Berkeley and Schopenhauer, will each draw their inspiration from the
classics, but the result will not be to make them resemble one another,
it will be to give vigour, decision, form, resolution, and dignity to
the qualities of each.

And as it is with individuals, so it is with nations. The schools of all
nations maintained their classical curriculum; boys still began, and
often ended, their schooling with the Latin grammar, but this did not
mean, as it had meant in the earlier days, that the influence was the
same. There was indeed little in common between what we may venture to
call the pedantry of Germany and the superficial elegancy of the Jesuit
schools. And so the classical basis did not prevent the school assuming
a national complexion. Let me give one illustration of the manner in
which the classical teaching could take a markedly national spirit.
Perhaps the most effective classical teaching that we find in the
eighteenth century is that at Eton, and it was on it that was founded
the great school of oratory and statesmanship. It was on Cicero and
Homer and Demosthenes that Pitt and Fox and Canning and Gladstone (for
the tradition continued to his day) formed their minds and their style,
but they emerged from their training above all Englishmen, but
Englishmen who had learnt how to give to their own national feelings a
dignity of expression and nobility of form equal to that of the
exemplars whom they had studied.

Now just as the finest expression of the Engli