LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES 563 



•about 1570 fully seventy per cent, of books published were in Latin. 

 Those printed in the vernacular were for the most part of a popular 

 ■character and considered by scholars beneath their notice. One hun- 

 dred years later the number of Latin and German books issued from 

 the press was about equal. But in fifty years from that date the pro- 

 portion of the latter to the former was about as one to two. This effort 

 to keep alive a language that no longer had its roots in contemporary 

 thought required a prodigious amount of labor. Nevertheless, the books 

 written by scholars for scholars thus obtained a wider currency than 

 they would have had if any of the vernaculars had been employed. 

 On the other hand, all works that were intended to be contributions to 

 literature were failures. Petrarch wrote most of his books in Latin; 

 yet they are virtually forgotten while his Italian sonnets are known 

 to all students of his vernacular. Many of his contemporaries spent 

 their time in equally fruitless labor. Dante knew better. Although 

 he wrote Latin with ease, he realized that he could not express his 

 inmost thoughts in an alien tongue. He seems to have been the first 

 man of modern times to discern a truth that Macaulay has expressed in 

 his essay on Frederick the Great : " No noble work of imagination, so 

 far as we can recollect, was ever composed by any man, except in a 

 •dialect which he had learned without remembering when or how, and 

 which he had spoken with perfect ease before he had analyzed its 

 structure." 



When we try to answer the question whether it is worth while to 

 study a language which conveys little or no information that we can 

 not get in our own we are confronted with a serious problem. We can 

 not draw a hard and fast line between what is useful and what is 

 useless, perhaps not even between what is more and what is less useful. 

 Few persons will deny that the beautiful is also useful and that the 

 •esthetic taste is as well worth cultivating as any other of our mental 

 powers. The fairest flowers produce no fruit. Music is absolutely of 

 no value, while sculpture and painting in their higher aspects are 

 •equally so. The same affirmation may be made of architecture. No 

 man has championed more vigorously and more eloquently the claims 

 •of esthetics than the high priest of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill. 

 He indignantly repudiates the charge that his system would exclude 

 the cultivation of any art that makes life richer or more worth living 

 than the pursuit of the narrowly practical. There is no room for 

 doubt that a student whose native language is English, with an occa- 

 sional exception, will get a more correct conception of Plato's philos- 

 ophy, for example, from Jowett's translation and comments than from 

 the original text. Some knowledge of Greek will be serviceable, but 

 it is not essential. If it be answered that no man of scholarly tastes 

 and scientific training will be satisfied with second-hand information, 

 the patent answer is that if we knew nothing except what we have 



