tion of literature can never come by mere untrained reading: I do not care to what kind of literature, or in what language expressed, you apply my denial. He who has made no such study of language as a liberal education implies cannot enter the inner temple of literature, he can scarcely cross the threshold of its outer courts; for the key to the temple is the knowing how to get at the meaning of any literature; and the knowing how to get at the meaning can only be acquired by the study—not of many languages as many, necessarily, but of at least some one language as the supreme expression of human thought and feeling.
In order to illustrate and enforce my opinion I turn somewhat aside for a moment to the current discussions over the place of the ancient classical languages—especially of the Greek—in a modern liberal education. The larger part of the arguments used against continuing these languages in the place they have formerly held seem to me beyond all doubt justifiable. The answers which the defenders of these languages have most employed are scarcely sufficient to ward off or to foil the attacks of their opponents. At the same time I most firmly believe in keeping the ancient classics substantially where they have been in the scheme of a truly liberal education; and I do not believe in the proposed substitution of any of the
