a vast number of words, within the last century many, to the disgrace of English authors; while philosophy and mathematics daily find the necessity of borrowing from the Latin and the Greek. With regard to the last-mentioned language, and the Latin, there is a difference as great as there is between a primitive genius and a secondhand imitator. Cicero, who laboured to defend his language, in his very defence of it showed its poverty, compared with the Greek, from the abundance of the Greek words which he was obliged to make use of in all his compositions, from his philosophical works even to his most familiar letters Taking the Latin language, as we have it even now, compared with the Greek, and with our own-the next in every thing that constitutes beauty in a language, to the Greek-it is miserably poor in its vocabulary, and decidedly deficient in its mechanism. The want of a definite article, and of a distinction between the preterite and aorist tenses, are defects so great as to place it below most other languages at present known. It is true that the Greek language is indisputably the finest ever spoken by any nation with whose literature we have become acquainted. It is, indeed, a most perfect and won derful machine of human thought; and may be called, in contradistinction to all others, the language of the soul; and, from its gigantic power and force, the language of the brave. In loftiness of sound it is like the thunders that play around its own Olympus, "full of the hollow greeting of the rocks." We may well conceive the effects of the orations of Demosthenes, independent of the eloquent matter of which they are composed. Most of the terminations of the Greek words are inconceivably grand. How noble must have been the effect, even in sound, of the following, from the lips of the finest orator of the Greeks Αλλως τε καὶ περὶ κοινων πραγματων καὶ γεγαλων υγων Βουλευομένων Besides its loftiness, it possesses also the most exquisite delicacy and harmony. Those minute and nice distinctions, which, in other languages, can find no expression, have, in the Greek, a mine of words capable of conveying the nicest and most delicate feelings of the soul. It draws lines where all other instruments of reason only make blots, and works out the various and most intricate metaphysical problems of the mind, where the Latin, with all its boasted powers, cannot get beyond the pons asinorum of expression. Such a language was worthy of the great men who threw their spirits into it, and whose presence, even now, haunts the mind with their intellectual beauty. Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Plato, and those great historians, which have thrown their sublime spells around us, fill us with a veneration and a love, which time tends rather to increase than to diminish. But, great as our admiration may be of the Greek language, the Greek literature, and the Greek philosophers, poets, moralists, and historians, we must not forget that our own language, and our own geniuses, at least equal, if they do not surpass those of Attica. Nay, we would Pronounced " Allose tee kaay peri koinone pragmatone kaay meggalone umone bowleuomenone." say, that our own tongue, in expression and in copiousness, does surpass that of ancient Greece; and that, as a language, it surpasses all the other ancient and modern languages. As to our own literature, great as was that of Greece and Rome, both together cannot equal it in richness, in variety, in sublimity, whether in poetry, eloquence, or philosophy. Shakspeare will stand before Euripides, and Milton before Sophocles, in the estimation of the candid critic, who has learned to eschew that adoration of the antique for antiquity's sake; and from the rich harvest of thought, living in the pages of our great prose writers, from Bacon to Johnson, not to mention the names of the present generation, may be reaped the highest of moral and intellectual food which ever administered to the spiritual comforts, physical uses, and common necessities of man. A very few words taken at random, will serve to show the inimitable power of expression, which our language possesses. Take the two most important words in all languages, those of affirmative and negative, with us yes and no. What a mild suavity there is in the former; the mouth opens with gentleness, and there is a frankness in the ex-pression of the lips; it cannot be spoken without the mouth is partially open, a proof that they are inimical to closeness and reserve: while nothing can be more pressingly negative, both in sound and in the position of the oral muscles, when giving it utterance, than no. The jaw falls, the face lengthens, there is a repulsiveness in the very aspiration of the monosyllable, that would indicate its meaning to a New Zealander. The lips are brought into a closer contact, and the word drops from them with the gravity of a bullet. Take again the English word thunder: how sublime its sound; it commences sonorously, and subsides into indistinctness, exactly like thunder. Take again the word cataract: there is an abruptness and brokenness about it, that forcibly convey the idea of a rush of waters, impeded in its precipitous course by crags and rocks. Words expressive of physical properties, are also strongly expressive in our language. Howl, conveys the mournful cry of the wolf. Bark, the sharp noise of the dog. Roar, not only the music of the winds, but also the peculiar voice of the lion. The lowing of oxen; the bleating of sheep; the grunting of pigs; the cackling of hens; the hissing of geese; the gabbling of ducks; the yelping of curs; the growling of the ferocious animals. Then look at abstract terms, little less in expression; look at flash, and dash, and crash, and clash. The word slow again, although containing only four letters, is longer in being pronounced than the word quick, consisting of five: the same may be said of the words, long and short. What a tosh-tooth sort of appearance has the word fierce; and what a sombre and bitter aspect has that of revenge, and how determined and savage is its sound: contrast this with the word love, or contrast love itself with hate, and what expression do we find. These instances of the power and beauty of our language, might be multiplied ad infinitum; but we shall not press the subject further, but rather inquire what classical knowledge (so called) does, for the various classes of society, which think themselves bound to acquire it. First then we may hold, that the Latin language is valuable as an in 66 66 troduction to the Greek; and for those who have the means, and the leisure to acquire that language, it is worth all the pains of head and body, which may be taken and endured for its sake. But he who enters upon its study must be shown, that the harvest of his reward lies far, very far, from the spring time of his hopes. He has a long and tedious path to pursue; the frozen icebergs of his Latin Grammar, and the burning deserts of his Greek accidence must be surmounted: he must be bound as it were to the monotonous wheel of Ixion, and take his never ending round of moods, tenses, and declensions. He must tread the thorny paths of his accidence. He must wander in perplexity, in the wilderness of " Pronominum constructio," and his verborum constructio," and strain up the rugged steep of Propria quæ Maribus, where ideas are as confined as those of an oyster. He must wade through the slough of his delectable "Delectus," and for seven long years be compelled to taste the dregs of bitterness, and the wine of the birch, before he can obtain a mere sniff of the spicy isles that lie beyond the wave." Seven other years of pilgrimage then commence, and at the end of even this second apprenticeship what is gained? Happy, indeed, is he who, like the fox-hunter, can ride over hedge, ditch, and stile; take five-barred gates, quagmires, briars, thorns, and furze, by the leap; and mud, slush, and filth, by the canter; for the sake of possessing at last a stinking animal not worth a groat. Happy, no doubt, is he who walks twenty miles to a fish-pond, broiled by the sun, and blinded by the dust; who wades through the bog with his sticklebats in his can, and his rod over his shoulder, and gives five pounds' worth of preparation to catch five penny worth of fish. And happy may he be who has a similar genius for the dead languages; and he may feel a positive pleasure in winding through the thorny thickets of the grammatical wilderness, to obtain in the end the name of a classical scholar. To such we would wish good speed; aye, and honour him too when he reaches the goal to which he sped; and we believe his reward in the end would be ample; but it is to such and such only that the study of the dead languages would be useful, except in certain cases, where a youth is designed for a particular profession; but how preposterously absurd is it to see every schoolmaster, where he takes boarders for £20 a year, and day scholars for 1s. a week, placarding the newspapers with "Classical School," and making a fuss about Plato and Xenophon, Virgil and Horace. The smattering of the classics, as it is called, or of the dead languages, in reality, which such pupils of such a calibre can possibly obtain, affords them a degree of pain in the pursuit sufficiently powerful to make them hate the very name of a classic author. Deriving thus no pleasure from learning Greek and Latin; they, so soon as they leave school, make all possible haste to forget it, they perhaps sometimes make a brag that they learned it at school, and exhibit a little vanity in the application of an odd quotation or so, of which, like Dominie Samson, they have quite forgot the meaning, for "The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of. Before a pupil can become a decent Latin scholar, he must commit to memory not less than ten thousand words; and if he would dabble in Greek, with merely a view to proficiency, he must make himself master of ten thousand more: besides all this, the multiplicity of rules and exceptions will make it a labour so great as to exclude, in the needy scholar, all other useful knowledge, and in the rich one a very great proportion of it: but even this having been done, the dead language student will only then find himself in the court-yard of the classical temple; and as far from entering the building itself as he would be from entering St. Paul's cathedral if he stood at the Goose and Gridiron, in St. Paul's Church-yard; which sign might well put him in mind of himself, and the torments of his classical establishment. Advanced thus far, he would in time be able to enter the portico, and be introduced to the dead heroes within the sanctuary; but he would grow out of breath before he reached the whispering gallery of converse with their spirits, and even then find the way dark, and crooked, and difficult, to the top; and at last, when viewing from its proud heights the wealth of its metropolis of beauty, would perhaps be perplexed and startled by some barbarous ATTIC Sound, as perplexing to the ear and understanding, as if he had met a west-country clown at that elevation addressing him in "pure Cornish." Then, good parents of England, do not be led astray by the pompous names of "classical academy;" for the term is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; except we give its real meaning-Words and not things; sounds and no ideas. If the child were to speak the truth, he would answer with Hamlet, to the inquiry of his tender parent, when she sees him poring over his well-thumbed dictionary, "What do you read my dear?"—" Words, words, words;" for so truly does the excess-the abuse of the classics, exclude that great universe of knowledge which makes a child feel he is a "living being." Ten thousand bright geniuses have wasted their sweetness on the desert air of the Latin and Greek grammar. The genial current of the soul has been repressed: the green buddings of fervid thought have been withered ere they could develope into bloom. Alas! how many, how very many, have been murdered by the classics. Poor Kirke White is a specimen of its victims; although to him classical knowledge was indispensable. But if it does not inflict death in many cases on the body, it continually does on the soul by the vast amount of education it excludes. Does it not shut out, in very many instances, knowledge of the vast variety of phenomena which exist in us and around us? Where do we find the wonders of nature, the properties of bodies, the anatomy of our own natural and spiritual being unfolded, as a part of school education? And do we find that most valuable of all booksthe Bible, in its proper place in either the common day, or common boarding-schools? How often do we find the living truths of that religion which has God for its author and salvation for its object, brought forth like light to vivify the inert mass of school morality? How often is the page of history, "rich with the spoils of time," read with a view to the building up of the inner or spiritual man, by the application of those great and morally heroic deeds, unconnected with the savage warfare of contending nations, and unstained with human blood? No longer then be under the foolish idea, that the classics, as they are termed, can in any degree benefit your children, who may be destined to active life; or that the attempt to make them classical scholars necessarily involves their being gentlemen; and least of all are they calculated to make them good sons, husbands, or fathers. In illustration, we cannot forbear quoting from the work of Mr. Simpson on Education, a work which cannot be too highly recommended. He says" Morality is placed by the classical authors upon a false and any thing but a Christian basis; and yet they are most strenuously advocated by the clergy, especially in England, as the most appropriate discipline for the youthful mind. This is evidently the result of the habit of not inquiring into the nature and consistency of long established customs. As part of an education professedly Christian, admiration of the ancient heathens is worked up almost to idolatry in the student their natural selfishness and injustice, called patriotism, are positively recommended as the noblest objects of imitation: the history of their murderous aggressive wars, rapine, and martial glory, is listened to with delight, and made in mimic essay the pastime of the play-ground of every grammar school: the sensuality and profligacy that defiles, sometimes with nameless abomination, the pages of the satirical and other poets, which, countenanced for a moment, would meet with and merit stoning by the populace; nay, the immoralities of the mythological pantheon itself, as a subject of study in a Christian country, have all, as stated exercises for our youth, afforded matter of amazement to those who perceive moral distinctions, and are accustomed to observe and think consistently. A different standard of morals, another rule of right and wrong, seems by habit to be applied to those privileged tribes of the ancient world, than is acknowledged, theoretically at least, in regard to the modern; so that sensuality, selfishness, injustice, rapacity, cruelty, and crime, are, in the first, not only passed over as of a different specific gravity from what they count for now-a-days, but are pressed upon the opening faculties as the constituents of moral grandeur and practical virtue! This essential barbarism recoils dreadfully on society: Christianity itself is overborne by a spurious morality imbibed from the ancient authors, and society continues selfish, sensual, and belligerent. It is high time that truth were looked in the face, and the world disabused of this superstition, which has too long survived the popish. When a higher moral education shall have taken the bandage from our eyes, it will cease to raise a shout of wonder and scorn to predicate that, morally viewed, the Greeks and Romans were barbarians from the first to the last hour of their history; and that in their own barbarism they were finally extinguished." It is a fact that their whole histories are written in blood: their noblest deeds are smeared with it: their patriotism is polluted by it: and their heroism is defiled by it. Their annals exhibit nations of pirates and freebooters on a large scale and insatiable rapacity is the distinguishing feature of their policy. How far our admiration of them have led to the wars of our own times, the philosopher will perchance one day discover. But even now we know that with all their host of |