io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



specialty for the few, classical studies still have a future before them, 

 and we can ill afford to lose the elevating and refining influence exer- 

 cised by their real votaries on those who do not directly pursue them ; 

 but as the main instruments of liberal culture their day seems to me to 

 be nearly over. 



In England, the very stronghold of the classical theory, classical 

 study seems to be declining, in spite of, or rather through, the very 

 means taken for keeping it alive. " I fear," says the late Earl of Der 

 by, in the preface to his translation of the Iliad, " that the faste for and 

 appreciation of classical literature are greatly on the decline." " The 

 study of classical literature is probably on the decline," says Matthew 

 Arnold, in his essay on translating Homer. " I cannot help thinking," 

 says Mr. Sidgwick, of Cambridge, "that classical literature, in spite 

 of its enormous prestige, has very little attraction for the mass even 

 of cultivated persons at the present day. I wish statistics could be 

 obtained of the amount of Latin and Greek read in any year, except 

 for professional purposes, even by those who have gone through a 

 complete classical curriculum. From the information that I have been 

 able privately to obtain, I incline to think that such statistics, when 

 compared with the fervent admiration with which we all speak of the 

 classics, upon every opportunity, would be found rather startling. 1 

 And the truth is that the classical system of liberal education in Eng- 

 land maintains its place, so far as it does maintain it, solely from the 

 fact of its being a strictly protected system, through the enormous pe- 

 cuniary prizes to which it is the sole means of access." 2 



Our own attempts to establish a liberal education seem to me to 

 have thus far proved little less than abortive, because, following as 

 we have in the steps of the mother-country, we cannot bring our- 

 selves to abandon the old shadow for the new substance. For 

 classical study has really dwindled into a shadow. Once it did 

 mean the study of philosophy, of ethics, politics, history, poetry; 

 now, for ninety-nine in a hundred of its students, it means none of 

 these, but the mere dry study of grammar. The scholars of the Re- 

 naissance read their Plato in the original, and compassed sea and 

 land to find a teacher who could unlock for them his treasure-house, 

 but it was the treasure-house of his thought, not his grammar. The 



1 "Essays on a Liberal Education, ed. Farrar," p. 106. 



2 " The prizes proposed," says Dr. Donaldson (" Classical Scholarship and Classical 

 Learning," p. 154), " are of enormous value. It is estimated that the first place in either 

 Tripos (classics or mathematics) is worth, in present value and contingent advantages, 

 about £10,000. ... In classics, the majority of successful candidates for high honors 

 have been under tuition in Greek and Latin for at least ten years." 



The number of college fellowships at Oxford is somewhat over 300, and their average 

 value £300 per annum. There are 400 scholarships, of an average value of £80, tenable 

 for five years. The incomes of nineteen heads of houses are estimated at £23,000 a year. 

 — (Heywood, in Social Science Transactions for 1871.) The sole access to all these pecu- 

 niary prizes has heretofore been through classical study. 



