54 SELECTED ESS A YS FROM LA Y SERMONS 



at an English performance of his own plays? Would 

 Hamlet, in the mouths of a set of French actors, who should 

 insist on pronouncing English after the fashion of their own 

 tongue, be more hideously ridiculous ? 



But it will be said that I am forgetting the beauty, and 

 the human interest, which appertain to classical studies. 

 To this I reply that it is only a very strong man who can 

 appreciate the charms of a landscape as he is toiling up a 

 steep hill, along a bad road. What with short-windedness, 

 stones, ruts, and a pervading sense of the wisdom of rest 

 and be thankful, most of us have little enough sense of the 

 beautiful under these circumstances. The ordinary school- 

 boy is precisely in this case. He finds Parnassus uncom- 

 monly 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 of ten he does not get to the top. 



But if this be a fair picture of the results of classical teach- 

 ing 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 clas- 

 sics of our ordinary middle-class schools? ^ 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 w^orth, 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, 



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

 valuable book, Essays on a Liberal Education, passim. 



