THE CLASSICAL CONTROVERSY. 641 



Granted that the boy left to himself would go more rapidly through 

 Burke than through Thucydides, might not his pace be arrested by a 

 well-directed cross-examination ; with this advantage, that the length 

 of attention might be graduated according to the importance of the 

 subject, and not according to the accidental difficulty of the lan- 

 guage ? 



The Professor boldly grapples with the alleged waste of time in 

 classics, and urges that " the gain may be measured by the time ex- 

 pended," which is very like begging the question. 



One advantage adduced under this head deserves notice. The lan- 

 guages being dead, as well as all the societies and interests that they 

 represent, they do not excite the prejudices and the passions of mod- 

 ern life. This, however, may need some qualification. Grote wrote 

 his history of Greece to counterwork the party bias of Mitford. The 

 battles of despotism, oligarchy, and democracy are to this hour fought 

 over the dead bodies of Greece and Rome. If the Professor meant to 

 insinuate that those that have gone through the classical training are 

 less violent as partisans, more dispassionate in political judgments, 

 than the rest of mankind, we can only say that we should not have 

 known this from our actual experience. The discovery of some sweet, 

 oblivious antidote to party feeling seems, as far as we can judge, to be 

 still in the future. If we want studies that will, while they last, 

 thoroughly divert the mind from the prejudices of party, science is 

 even better than ancient history ; there are no party cries connected 

 with the Binomial Theorem. 



The Professor's last branch of argument, I am obliged with all 

 deference to say, contains no argument at all. It is that, in classical 

 education, a close contact is established between the mind of the boy. 

 and the mind of the master. He does not even attempt to show how 

 the effect is peculiar to classical teaching. The whole of this part of 

 the paper is, in fact, addressed, by way of remonstrance, to the writer's 

 own friends, the classical teachers. He reproaches them for their in- 

 efficiency, for their not being Arnolds. It is not my business to inter- 

 fere between him and them in this matter. So much stress does he 

 lay upon the teacher's part in the work, that I almost expected the 

 admission that a good teacher in English, German, natural history, 

 political economy, might even be preferable to a bad teacher of Latin 

 and Greek. 



The recent Oxford contest has brought out the eminent oratorical 

 powers of Canon Liddon ; and we have some curiosity in noting his 

 contributions to the classical side. I refer to his letter in the " Times." 

 The gist of his advocacy of Greek is contained in the following alle- 

 gations : First, the present system enables a man to recur with profit 

 and advantage to Greek literature. To this it has been often replied, 

 that by far the greater number are too little familiarized with the 



VOL. XV. 41 



