374 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



a wise man, the Reverend Dr. John A. Broaddus, of Louisville. The 

 only other reason I can divine lies in the greater variety of word 

 order in Latin, the capacity of the phrase for variation, its unfixedness, 

 as compared with the modern phrase. This is the only reason I can 

 give myself for the close attention I must pay to get Horace's meaning 

 in the " Satires," where language and syntax are thoroughly in posses- 

 sion, and the thought is plain and even bourgeois. 



In the debate as to the respective educative value of the classics and 

 the modern languages, the facts seem to justify the statement that the 

 solution of the classic language puzzle requires greater effort, atten- 

 tion more concentrated and for a longer time. If this be true, and we 

 abandon the old for the new, we must anticipate some necessary loss. 

 It remains for the advocates of the change to demonstrate the contrary. 

 In my opinion, the rebound from Spanish or German does not promise 

 so active a motion. Possibly a language of a type very different from 

 our own might produce a greater rebound. The Japanese who is 

 learning English may well feel it a severer training than a German 

 would. For myself, I can but think that the study which requires the 

 greater concentration, like Latin, is more educative than the easier 

 study like Spanish or French. I can but believe that the puzzle of a 

 game like whist furnishes a higher recreation than the lesser puzzles 

 of a game like euchre. 



But Professor Hill thinks it likely that the due linguistic training of 

 an Englishman might be had from the study of English, and above all 

 of Shakespeare. 2 Supposing this to be true, who shall tell us that 

 English would require, in the end, less time? Or that the study of 

 English might not prove humanly less interesting? It is by no means 

 clear that the paraphrase can replace the translation. Cicero, who tried 

 the paraphrase of Latin as well as translation from the Greek, forsook the 

 former as involving, if his stylistic model were well chosen, an almost 

 sure replacement, in the paraphrase, of the better by the worse. In 

 my mother's generation children were taught to parse and paraphrase 

 Milton. I have heard them as adults describe the awful tediousness of 

 it, in the tone of those who attribute their disregard for formal religion 

 to a training in " The Shorter Catechism " and the strictness of the 



2 This point is well answered by the following citation from Dr. Arnold 

 (Stanley's "Life," II., letter cxxxviii) : "My delight in going over Homer and 

 Virgil with the boys makes me think what a treat it must be to teach Shaken 

 speare to a good class of young Greeks in regenerate Athens; to dwell upon him 

 line by line and word by word, in the way that nothing but a translation lesson 

 ever will enable one to do; and so to get all his pictures and thoughts leisurely 

 into one's mind. . . . And how could this ever be done without having the 

 process of construing, as the grosser medium through which alone all the beauty 

 can be transmitted, because else we travel too fast, and more than half of it 

 escapes us? Shakespeare, with English boys, would be but a poor substitute 

 for Homer. ..." 



