of Maggie's questions, to the astonishing conviction that the Romans were once live men and women, who learned their mother tongue through some easier medium than the Latin grammar.
Again and again Mr. Jessopp has tried the experiment of lecturing on local antiquities and the dim traditions of ancient country parishes; and he has always found that these topics, which carried with them some homely and familiar flavor of the soil, awoke a deep and abiding interest in minds to which abstract ethics and technical knowledge appealed alike in vain. School boards may raise the cry for useful information, and fancy that a partial acquaintance with chlorides and phosphates is all that is necessary to make of a sulky yokel an intelligent agriculturist and a contented citizen; but a man must awaken before he can think, and think before he can work, and work before he can realize his position and meaning in the universe. And it needs a livelier voice than that of elementary chemistry to arouse him. "The Whigs," said Sir Walter Scott, "will live and die in the belief that the world is ruled by pamphlets
