Liberal Education. 267 



in the hope of obtaining prizes or a college reputa- 

 tion, in case of success. But in our best colleges 

 any student can graduate, and most do gradu- 

 ate, without ever having written Latin or Greek 

 except in more or less halting prose. In Eng- 

 land, however, there lingers in many quarters a 

 queer superstition, that the chief end of clas- 

 sical education is to enable its votaries to beguile 

 their leisure hours by stringing together hexa- 

 meters. As the result of this system, we have 

 some pretty poems in the " Arundines Cami," 

 Mr. D'Arcy Thompson's "Prolusiones Homericae," 

 Lord Lyttelton's " Samson Agonistes," and many 

 hundred reams of detestable trash, written in a 

 dialect such as Aristophanes would hardly have 

 thought fit for the silliest geese and cockatoos of 

 his Cloudcuckooville. In the time now wasted 

 in verse composition in each college career, the 

 methods and leading results of several physical 

 sciences might easily be learned. This is the 

 kind of " instruction " which our essayists would 

 be glad to see done away with. They hold that 

 the chief end of classical education is, beside af- 

 fording scope for the exercise of sagacity in rea- 

 soning, to enlarge our minds by making us ac- 

 quainted with the ideas, feelings, and customs of 

 a time when men thought, felt, and acted very 



