day it would require fourteen months to translate Cicero's oration Pro Milone, so that to finish even the single speech within a year many parts of it must be run over more or less rapidly. At this rate of ten lines a day, it would require more than five years to translate the Aeneid, and twelve years to translate the Iliad, or two years longer than the siege of Troy lasted. The Ratio cannot, therefore, wish to bind the student and professor down to these few lines."[1] It wishes merely to show the student how to read and study the classics, how to do thorough work. Many more lines are to be read in a lesson, but the few should serve as the model. The schemata of Father Jouvancy do not want more. Nor is it to be inferred that all the lines are to be explained with the same thoroughness and at the same length. This would be impossible.
Moreover, we are led to the same conclusion from the programmes of some of the celebrated colleges of the old Society. They prove with certainty that the thorough study of a limited number of lines was not considered sufficient to make a student a classical scholar. In the history of the college of La Flèche,[2] we find programmes of the astounding work done by the students. Perhaps the plan of the Ratio has never been carried out more thoroughly than it was at this college, which for a long time was a rival of the great University of Paris. Here, too, one of the best commentators of the Ratio, Father Jouvancy, taught and
