CLASSICAL STUDIES IN ENGLAND 79 



prestige, because academic honors were rec- 

 ognized as a sure road to later success. In 

 political and ecclesiastical circles especially, 

 young men who had distinguished themselves 

 at the university were much in demand. Greek 

 scholarship, as it has been said, led not only to 

 knowledge of the means of salvation in the 

 next world, but to positions of emolument in 

 this. Fellows of colleges who wanted church 

 preferment edited Greek plays. I fear bishops 

 have other qualifications now. In and outside 

 the church some sort of classical knowledge 

 was the appanage of the governing classes. In 

 "Friendship's Garland" M. Arnold depicts the 

 Rev. Esau Hittall, the sporting parson of the 

 mid- Victorian era, whose claims to culture 

 rested on a legendary copy of verses ("longs 

 and shorts") on the Calydonian boar. If a 

 man had no other considerable claims to re- 

 spect, he was, if an elegant scholar, entitled to 

 look down on those who, like Shakespeare, had 

 small Latin and less Greek. You may remem- 

 ber Thackeray's somewhat ungentle picture 

 of a Fellow of a College, often drunk and quite 

 useless to the world (as Thackeray says) when 



