tes, and had read a lot of English for
myself. It is nothing short of infamous that any one should, after an
elaborate education, have been so grossly uneducated. My only
accomplishment was the writing of rather pretty Latin verse.

And yet this preposterous system continues year after year. I had an
animated argument with some of the best of my colleagues the other day
about it. I cannot tell you how profoundly irritating these wiseacres
were. They said all the stock things--that one must lay a foundation,
and that it could only be laid by using the best literatures; that
Latin was essential because it lay at the root of so many other
languages; and Greek, because there the human intellect had reached its
high-water mark,--"and it has such a noble grammar," one enthusiastic
Grecian said; that an active-minded person could do all the rest for
himself. It was in vain to urge that in many cases the whole foundation
was insecure; and that all desire to raise a superstructure was
eliminated. My own belief is that Greek and Latin are things to be led
up to, not begun with; that they are hard, high literatures, which
require an initiation to comprehend; and that one ought to go backwards
in education, beginning with what one knows.

It seems to me, to use a similitude, that the case is thus. If one
lives in a plain and wishes to reach a point upon a hill, one must make
a road from the plain upwards. It will be a road at the base, it will
be a track higher up, and a path at last, used only by those who have
business there. But the classical theorists seem to me to make an
elaborate section of macadamised road high in the hills, and, having
made it, to say that the people who like can make their own road in
between.

How would I mend all this? Well, I would change methods in the first
place. If one wanted to teach a boy French or German effectively, so
that he would read and appreciate, one would dispense with much of the
grammar, except what was absolutely necessary. In the case of classics
it is all done the other way; grammar is a subject in itself; boys have
to commit to memory long lists of words and forms which they never
encounter; they have to acquire elaborate analyses of different kinds
of usages, which are of no assistance in dealing with the language
itself. It is beginning with the wrong end of the stick. Grammar is the
scientific or philosophical theory of language; it may be an
interesting and valuable study f