THE ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE 539 



game of words with conviction: they looked upon the triumphant ap- 

 plication of arbitrary rules of logic as proof. They apprehended the 

 principles of thought; but failed because they mistook their own by- 

 laws for natural law. The Popes of the Kenaissance, who, like 

 Eugenius IV., made the only test for high office in the Church an 

 irreproachable Latin style, were not actuated merely by fashion or 

 caprice: they mistook rhetorical ability for intellectual power, elo- 

 quence for wisdom. They were right in the idea, although too zealous 

 in its application. Eloquence would be wisdom made manifest, if, in 

 the multitudinous torrent of words, none were used in an ambiguous 

 sense, none were superfluous, none were capable of replacement by 

 others more congruous with the thought, none could be displaced from 

 their position in the phrase without detriment to its sense. 



It is not natural to children to make nice distinctions between 

 approximately equivalent words. It is hardly second nature with 

 grown men, especially if they be Englishmen. A boy finds that it is 

 ' jolly beastly ' to have to go back to school, and ' beastly jolly ' to be 

 coming home. He is always struggling back to barbarism — the use of 

 gesture and stress in place of words. Even grown men have usually 

 got to get somewhere. They have got to get their hair cut, or have 

 got to get a book, have got a cold, or have got home. A very few 

 tesserce serve them to make the pattern of their thoughts, and their 

 thoughts are in consequence crude and colorless. Children must learn 

 words and must be drilled in their use. To attribute the proved suc- 

 cess of classical education to its content appears to me a ludicrous and 

 even wilful misreading of history ; though I readily admit that even the 

 average boy acquires something of valor, of patriotism, of esthetic 

 sensibility, of emotional and intellectual sanity from contact with the 

 mind of Greeks and Eomans. 



My doubt is as to whether, considering the modern conditions of life, 

 the time has not yet come to replace Greek and Latin by modern and 

 functional languages; to trust to their masterpieces for material with 

 which to influence character; and, in the case of children who will 

 never need to speak or read any language but English, to rely upon 

 our own Shakspere for words, grammar and emotional tone. 



If we but knew the most rudimentary principles of the psychology 

 of speech ! What form of language is best suited for the expression of 

 thought ? What form of language is most favorable to thinking ? To 

 those of us who have been through the ordinary grammar-school train- 

 ing the highly organized classical languages appear to be indisputably 

 superior to their maimed and curtailed successors. We feel that gun- 

 powder has not done more harm to the temples of Athens and Eome 

 than the barbarians have done to Greek and Latin. We can not resist 

 the impression that modern Greek and Italian, as they are but the 

 ruins and vestiges of the languages in which Demosthenes and Cicero 



