946 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



Rome and Greece, which do not form part of their compulsory 

 reading. It will hardly be affirmed that one in ten of them does 

 so. And why not ? The reason is two-fold. First, there is 

 hardly one in ten, in whose mind the classics ever cease to be 

 associated with notions of painful labor. Reading is not, there- 

 fore, pursued beyond the limit of what is required, because it is 

 not agreeable. Bat secondly and chiefly, there is hardly one in 

 ten whose knowledge of the Latin or the Greek is ever sufficiently 

 familiar to give him the command of the ancient literature which 

 it is asserted for him that he enjoys. I suppose that to read with 

 any satisfaction any work in any language, we should be able to 

 give our attention to the ideas that it conveys, without being 

 embarrassed or confused by want of familiarity with the machinery 

 through which they are imparted. It will not be for mere plea- 

 sure that we shall pursue our task, if every sentence brings us a 

 new necessity to turn over our lexicons, or to reason out a proba- 

 ble meaning by the application of the laws of syntax. And 3'et, 

 if there arc any of our graduates who are able, without such 

 embarrassments, to read a classical author, never attempted before, 

 the number must be very few. If there are any who can read 

 even such books of Latin or Greek as they have read before, with 

 anything like the fluency with which they read their mother 

 tongue, the number cannot be large ; and if there are any who 

 can read with similar facility, classic works which tliey take up 

 for the first time, it is so small that I have never seen one. 



It appears to me, then, that the results actually attained under 

 our present system of instruction, are neither very flattering nor 

 veiy encouraging. We should certainly not have been so content 

 with them as we seem, if we had not all along kept up before us 

 the fiction that they are not what they are, but what they ought 

 to be. For a period varying from seven to ten years, (four years 

 in college and from three to six in preparation), we keep young 

 men under a course of instruction in Latin and Greek ; and, at 

 the end of that time, they are unable, in any proper sense, to read 

 either the one or the other. Can a person be said to know a 

 lanjjuaire which he cannot read ? And is it a result worth the 

 time and labor expended upon it to attain such a doubtful acquaint- 

 ance with a language or anything else, as that which the majority 

 of our graduates carry away with them of these, at the close of 

 their educational career? Might not the same amount of time 

 and labor differently employed have produced, at last, something 



