EDITOR'S TABLE. 



267 



tant faculties of the mind those which 

 can only be aroused to vigorous action 

 by direct application to the facts of the 



' phenomenal world. That classical stu- 

 dies fail here has been long conceded. 

 Dr. Whewell declares that " mere clas- 

 sical reading is a narrow and enfeebling 

 education," and Sydney Smith speaks 

 of " the safe and elegant imbecilities of 

 classical culture." A system charac- 

 terized by feebleness and imbecility in 

 its mental reactions is no preparation 

 for dealing with the stern problems of 

 modern life. More and more it is felt 

 to be out of place, and is consequently 

 neglected. No kind of culture degen- 

 erates sO readily into stupid mechani- 

 cal routine as that of language. Pro- 

 fessor Halford Vaughn thus character- 

 izes the effects upon the mind of our 

 excessive addition to lingual pursuits : 

 " There is no study that could prove 

 more successful in producing often 

 thorough idleness and vacancy of mind, 

 parrot - like repetition and sing - song 



knowledge, to the abeyance and de- 

 struction of the intellectual powers, as 

 well as to the loss and paralysis of 

 the outward senses, than our tradi- 

 tional study and idolatry of language." 

 Very properly may it be said that our 

 inordinate study of language is an idol- 

 atry of which the blind devotion to 

 Greek is but the fetichistic form. The 

 cause of the failure of the classics is, 

 therefore, not because a thousand years 

 of experience with them has failed to 

 give us good methods of study, but be- 

 cause, in the competition with modern 

 sciences, ' as Canon Farrar remarks, 

 " they have been weighed in the bal- 

 ance and found wanting." 



We have, therefore, to regard the 

 educational failure of the dead lan- 

 guages as a result of the progress of the 

 human mind, and therefore as a normal 

 and inevitable thing. They hold their 

 position against the advancing knowl- 

 edge of the age through the power of tra- 

 dition, through the blind veneration of 

 things ancient, because they represent a 



conventional culture, and are conserved 

 by old and wealthy institutions. There 

 is, besides, a good deal of money in the 

 classics, which is not to be overlooked 

 when we wish to account for the te- 

 nacity with which they are maintained. 

 Professor Gildersleeve, in a recent arti- 

 cle ''On Classics in Colleges," in the 

 " Princeton Review," takes a very hope- 

 ful view of their continued ascendency 

 because, among other reasons, " the vest- 

 ed interests of classical study are, even 

 from a mercantile point of view, enor- 

 mous. Not only teachers, but book- 

 makers, have a heavy stake in the for- 

 tunes of the classics, and the capital 

 involved in them reminds us of the 

 pecuniary hold of paganism in the early 

 Christian centuries." Through the op- 

 eration of such causes, the classics will 

 undoubtedly linger long in the uni- 

 versities, but that they must yield to 

 the pressure of modern knowledge is 

 inevitable ; and the indications that 

 they are yielding are apparent on every 

 hand. 



But if the failure of dead-language 

 studies be thus necessary for the causes 

 assigned, can they then be said to suc- 

 ceed, even if the student accomplishes 

 everything proposed ? Is it so entirely 

 clear that he who faithfully masters 

 them is not worse off than he who 

 slurs and neglects them ? The presi- 

 dents of our colleges tell us that the stu- 

 dents of Latin and Greek actually suc- 

 ceed, even when they seem to fail ; but 

 may it not be said with more truth that 

 they fail even when they seem most to 

 succeed, so that it is hardly a para- 

 dox to say the greater the success the 

 greater the failure? If classical studies 

 are behind the age and out of place, 

 then the greater the proficiency the 

 worse the displacement. The hope is 

 on the idlers at the tails of their classes, 

 as they stand a chance of learning some- 

 thing else, while the poor victim of clas- 

 sical infatuation,with his cultivated con- 

 tempt of everything useful, comes out 

 the most pitiable of all failures. Hap- 



