PREPARATION FOR COLLEGE. 17 



tial part of a university education. Both Greek and Hebrew 

 were introduced later, when the Reformers found the original 

 text more favorable to them than the Latin translations. 



Greek and Latin thus introduced into the college course have 

 maintained their prestige unshaken almost to the present time, 

 and, having taken such high rank in the college course, the fitting 

 schools have been compelled to arrange their courses to meet the 

 demands of the colleges ; so that till quite recently the curricu- 

 lum of most secondary schools was composed mainly of three 

 studies, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. An English teacher of 

 classics of the present time, speaking of the head master of the 

 school which he attended as a boy, says : " The doctor was a noble 

 type of the old-fashioned English head master. He had a loath- 

 ing for all scientific study, was utterly ignorant of modern lan- 

 guages, English literature of the day to him was non-existent, his 

 lectures smacked of the last century with their long modulating 

 periods and pauses Ciceronian. All information, historical, anti- 

 quarian, geographical, or philosophic, as connected with the 

 classics, he regarded with contempt ; any dunderhead, he consid- 

 ered, might cram that at his leisure; but it pained him to the 

 quick if a senior pupil violated the Porsonian pause or trifled 

 with a subjunctive. 'A word in your ear, doctor,' said an Ox- 

 ford examiner once to him, 'your captain, yesterday, could not 

 tell me where Elis was.' ' I looked horrified,' said the doctor in 

 repeating the circumstance. ' I looked horrified, of course, but 

 on my word I did not know it myself.' From his point of view 

 a boy's chief aim in life was evidently to spend years in studying 

 etymology, syntax, and prosody, and still other years in trying to 

 write Latin verses, a thing which Cicero himself could not have 

 done well." 



The classical craze never obtained so strong a foothold in this 

 country as in England, and it might be difficult to find, especially 

 at the present time, any head master in America to whom the 

 above description would apply, and yet I have known some, a 

 composite photograph of whom would show many of the old doc- 

 tor's prominent characteristics. Dr. Gardner, for many years the 

 head master of the Boston Latin School, one of the largest and 

 best fitting schools /n this country, was not a mathematician, and 

 whether or not well versed in modern languages, including Eng- 

 lish, he never wasted much time in teaching those subjects to the 

 boys. But woe to the boy who did not know his Latin grammar 

 from cover to cover ; who could not write his Greek accents as 

 readily as cross his t's in English ; who had forgotten one of the 

 irregular verbs ; or who could not detect an Ionic or Doric form 

 long before he knew why it was used, or whether or not anybody 

 ever used it except on special occasions for special purposes ! 



VOL. XLVI. 2 



