y, and was specially distinguished at Westminster
for his declamations. He translated every oration of Cicero
into English and back again into Latin.

Fox can hardly have been supposed to have practised much in
debating societies, as he entered the House of Commons when
he was nineteen years old. But it is quite probably that
he was drilled by translations from Latin and Greek into English;
and in the House of Commons he had in early youth the advantage
of the best debating society in the world. It is said that
he read Latin and Greek as easily as he read English. He
himself said that he gained his skill at the expense of the
House, for he had sometimes tasked himself during the entire
session to speak on every question that came up, whether he
was interested in it or not, as a means of exercising and
training his faculties. This is what made him, according
to Burke, "rise by slow degrees to be the most brilliant and
accomplished debater the world ever saw."

Sir Henry Bulwer's "Life of Palmerston" does not tell us whether
he was trained by the habit of writing translations or in
debating societies. But he was a very eager reader of the
classics. There is little doubt, however, considering the
habit of his contemporaries at Cambridge, and that he was
ambitious for public life, and represented the University
of Cambridge in Parliament just after he became twenty-one,
that he belonged to a debating society and that he was drilled
in English composition by translation from the classics.

Gladstone was a famous debater in the Oxford Union, as is
well known, and was undoubtedly in the habit of writing translations
from Greek and Latin, of which he was always so passionately
fond. He says in his paper on Arthur Hallam that the Eton
debating club known as the Society supplied the British Empire
with four Prime Ministers in fourscore years.

The value of the practice of translation from Latin or Greek
into English, in getting command of good English style, in
my judgment, can hardly be stated too strongly. The explanation
is not hard to find. You have in these two languages and
especially in Latin, the best instrument for the most precise
and most perfect expression of thought. The Latin prose of
Tacitus and Cicero, the verse of Virgil and Horace, are like
a Greek statue, or an Italian cameo--you have not only exquisite
beauty, but also exquisite precision. You get the thought
into your mind with the accurac