ABSTRACT
I wish this occasional and irregular training to be made as general and systematic as possible; and I feel sure that whatever classical teaching was retained, would become more efficacious by the introduction of the new element; and this not merely because every new mental stimulus that can be applied to a boy is immediately felt over the whole range of his work, but because the boy would gain a special motive for learning Latin and Greek, which he had hitherto been without, and the want of which had made his studies (to use the words of a Quarterly reviewer) ‘a prolonged nightmare.’ He might not at once begin to enjoy the classics: his progress might be still so slow, and his attention so much concentrated on the form of his authors, as to allow him but a feeble interest in their substance. But he would be cheered by the hope of this interest becoming daily stronger: he might distinctly look forward to the time when Sophocles would be as dear to him as Shakespeare, when Cicero and Tacitus would stir him like Burke and Macaulay. Again, some modern literature has a direct power of revealing to us the charm of ancient literature, of enabling us to see and feel in the older masterpieces what the élite of each generation could see and feel for themselves when the language was once understood, but
what for the mass requires an interpreter. Some, for instance, would perhaps be ashamed to confess how shallow an appreciation they had of Greek art till they read Goethe and Schiller, Lessing and Schlegel. No doubt there are boys who find out the beauties for themselves, just as there are some to whom it would be a feast to be turned into a room full of fragments of antique sculpture. But our system is framed for the mass, and I feel convinced that the mass require to appreciate both the one and the other a careful preparation, the most important part of which would be supplied by a proper introduction into education of the element I am advocating.5
