40 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [H L 



us have little enough sense of the beautiful under these cir 

 cumstances. The ordinary schoolboy is precisely in this case. 

 He finds Parnassus uncommonly steep, and there is no chance 

 of his having much time or inclination to look about him till he 

 gets to the top. And nine times out often he does not get to the top. 



But if this be a fair picture of the results of classical teaching 

 at its best and I gather from those who have authority to speak 

 on such matters that it is so what is to be said of classical 

 teaching at its worst, or in other words, of the classics of our 

 ordinary middle-class schools ? 1 I will tell you. It means- 

 getting up endless forms and rules by heart. It means turning 

 Latin and Greek into English, for the mere sake of being able 

 to do it, and without the smallest regard to the worth, or 

 worthlessness, of the author read. It means the learning of 

 innumerable, not always decent, fables in such a shape that the 

 meaning they once had is dried up into utter trash ; and the 

 only impression left upon a boy s mind is, that the people who 

 believed such things must have been the greatest idiots the 

 world ever saw. And it means, finally, that after a dozen years 

 spent at this kind of work, the sufferer shall be incompetent 

 to interpret a passage in an author he has not already got up ; 

 that he shall loathe the sight of a Greek or Latin book ; and that 

 he shall never open, or think of, a classical writer again, until, 

 wonderful to relate, he insists upon submitting his sons to the- 

 same process. 



These be your gods, O Israel I For the sake of this net result 

 (and respectability) the British father denies his children all the 

 knowledge they might turn to account in life, not merely for the 

 achievement of vulgar success, but for guidance in the great 

 crises of human existence. This is the stone he offers to those 

 whom he is bound by the strongest and tenderest ties to feed 

 with bread. 



If primary and secondary education are in this unsatisfactory 



1 For a justification of what is here said about these schools, see that 

 valuable book, &quot; Essays on a Liberal Education,&quot; passim. 



