dently instead of
being taught to speak; to aestheticise on your own account, when you
ought to be taught to approach works of art almost piously; to
philosophise without assistance, while you ought to be compelled to
_listen_ to great thinkers. All this with the result that you remain
eternally at a distance from antiquity and become the servants of the
day.

"At all events, the most wholesome feature of our modern institutions
is to be found in the earnestness with which the Latin and Greek
languages are studied over a long course of years. In this way boys
learn to respect a grammar, lexicons, and a language that conforms to
fixed rules; in this department of public school work there is an
exact knowledge of what constitutes a fault, and no one is troubled
with any thought of justifying himself every minute by appealing (as
in the case of modern German) to various grammatical and
orthographical vagaries and vicious forms. If only this respect for
language did not hang in the air so, like a theoretical burden which
one is pleased to throw off the moment one turns to one's
mother-tongue! More often than not, the classical master makes pretty
short work of the mother-tongue; from the outset he treats it as a
department of knowledge in which one is allowed that indolent ease
with which the German treats everything that belongs to his native
soil. The splendid practice afforded by translating from one language
into another, which so improves and fertilises one's artistic feeling
for one's own tongue, is, in the case of German, never conducted with
that fitting categorical strictness and dignity which would be above
all necessary in dealing with an undisciplined language. Of late,
exercises of this kind have tended to decrease ever more and more:
people are satisfied to _know_ the foreign classical tongues, they
would scorn being able to _apply_ them.

"Here one gets another glimpse of the scholarly tendency of public
schools: a phenomenon which throws much light upon the object which
once animated them,--that is to say, the serious desire to cultivate
the pupil. This belonged to the time of our great poets, those few
really cultured Germans,--the time when the magnificent Friedrich
August Wolf directed the new stream of classical thought, introduced
from Greece and Rome by those men, into the heart of the public
schools. Thanks to his bold start, a new order of public schools was
established, which thenceforward was no