to
afford this waste, that has secured to the classics their position of
prerogative in the scheme of higher learning, and has led to their being
esteemed the most honorific of all learning. They serve the decorative
ends of leisure-class learning better than any other body of knowledge,
and hence they are an effective means of reputability.

In this respect the classics have until lately had scarcely a rival.
They still have no dangerous rival on the continent of Europe, but
lately, since college athletics have won their way into a recognized
standing as an accredited field of scholarly accomplishment, this latter
branch of learning--if athletics may be freely classed as learning--has
become a rival of the classics for the primacy in leisure-class
education in American and English schools. Athletics have an obvious
advantage over the classics for the purpose of leisure-class learning,
since success as an athlete presumes, not only waste of time, but also
waste of money, as well as the possession of certain highly unindustrial
archaic traits of character and temperament. In the German universities
the place of athletics and Greek-letter fraternities, as a leisure-class
scholarly occupation, has in some measure been supplied by a skilled and
graded inebriety and a perfunctory duelling.

The leisure class and its standard of virtue--archaism and waste--can
scarcely have been concerned in the introduction of the classics into
the scheme of the higher learning; but the tenacious retention of the
classics by the higher schools, and the high degree of reputability
which still attaches to them, are no doubt due to their conforming so
closely to the requirements of archaism and waste.

"Classic" always carries this connotation of wasteful and archaic,
whether it is used to denote the dead languages or the obsolete or
obsolescent forms of thought and diction in the living language, or to
denote other items of scholarly activity or apparatus to which it is
applied with less aptness. So the archaic idiom of the English language
is spoken of as "classic" English. Its use is imperative in all speaking
and writing upon serious topics, and a facile use of it lends dignity to
even the most commonplace and trivial string of talk. The newest form
of English diction is of course never written; the sense of that
leisure-class propriety which requires archaism in speech is present
even in the most illiterate or sensational writers in suf