EDITOR'S TABLE. 



121 



from childhood to manhood, but a 

 knowledge of Latin and Greek, with a 

 little English and arithmetic, wo have 

 here the strongest testimony that their 

 knowledge of the former is most inac- 

 curate, and their knowledge of the lat- 

 ter contemptible." 



And now let us observe how this 

 thorough-going system is characterized 

 by one who has had the best possible 

 opportunities for observing and know- 

 ing its results. In a lecture delivered 

 before the Royal Institution of Great 

 Britain, by the Rev. F. W. Farrar, a 

 distinguished author and philologist, 

 and who was one of the masters of 

 Harrow School, and for thirteen years 

 a classical teacher, we have the follow- 

 ing estimate of the present value of the 

 system. Canon Farrar says : " I must, 

 then, avow my own deliberate opinion, 

 arrived at in the teeth of the strongest 

 possible bias and prejudice in the op- 

 posite direction — arrived at with the 

 fullest possible knowledge of every sin- 

 gle argument which may be urged on 

 the other side — I must avow my dis- 

 tinct conviction that our present sys- 

 tem of exclusively classical education, 

 as a whole, and carried out as we do 

 carry it out, is a deplorable failure. I 

 say it, knowing that the words are 

 strong words, but not without having 

 considered them well ; and I say it be- 

 cause that system has been ' weighed 

 in the balance and found wanting.' It 

 is no epigram, but a simple fact, to say 

 that classical education neglects all the 

 powers of some minds, and some of the 

 powers of all minds. In the case of 

 the few it has a value which, being 

 partial, is unsatisfactory ; in the case of 

 the vast multitude it ends in utter and 

 irremediable waste." 



In speaking of the defects in teach- 

 ing the dead languages. President Por- 

 ter refers to the superiority in some 

 points of English over American meth- 

 ods. He says : " The culture and ele- 

 vation which might come were the 

 power of rapid and facile reading cul- 



tivated, and the use of it, or the ex- 

 pression of thought and feeling appre- 

 ciated, fail in great measure to be at- 

 tained. These mistakes and failures 

 are probably more conspicuous in the 

 American colleges than in those of 

 England or Germany, for the reason 

 that in England composition in prose 

 and verse compels to a certain mastery 

 of the vocabulary, and a sense of the 

 use of words which mere grammatical 

 analysis can never impart." 



Certainly, if anywhere, we should 

 expect to find in these critical construc- 

 tive exercises in " composition in prose 

 and verse," which President Porter 

 recognizes as a special excellence of the 

 English teaching, the most successful ex- 

 emplification of the benefits of classical 

 culture. But Canon Farrar refers to 

 this very practice in the following scath- 

 ing terms as the worst failure of the sys- 

 tem : " To myself, trained in the system 

 for yeai-8, and training others in it for 

 years — being one of those who succeed- 

 ed in it, if that amount of progress which 

 has been thought worthy of high clas- 

 sical honors in two universities may 

 be called success — influenced, therefore, 

 by every conceivable prejudice of au- 

 thority, experience, and personal van- 

 ity in its favor, I can only give my 

 emphatic conclusion that every year 

 the practice of it appears to me increas- 

 ingly deplorable, and the theory of it 

 every year increasingly absurd." 



After giving some examples, this dis- 

 gusted but but unusually candid clas- 

 sical teacher thus proceeds : " This 

 is the sort of ' kelp and brick-dust ' 

 used to polish the cogs of their mental 

 machinery ! And when, for a good dec- 

 ade of human life, and those its most 

 invaluable years, a boy has stumbled on 

 this dreadful mill-round, without pro- 

 gressing a single step, and is plucked 

 at his matriculation for Latin prose, we 

 flatter ourselves, forsooth, that we have 

 been giving him the best means for 

 learning Latin quotations, for improving 

 taste (or what passes for such), for ac- 



