has been often said, into a residuum. Something also is to be said for the greatness of the writers that have written in modern times. Sir John Herschel remarked long ago that the human intellect can not have degenerated, so long as we are able to quote Newton, Lagrange, and Laplace, against Aristotle and Archimedes. I would not undertake to say that any modern mind has equaled Aristotle in the range of his intellectual powers; but, in point of intensity of grasp in any one subject, he has many rivals; so that, to obtain his equal, we have only to take two or three first-rate moderns.
If a number of persons were to go on lauding to the skies the exclusive and transcendent greatness of the classical writers, we should probably be tempted to scrutinize their merits more severely than is usual. Many things could be said against their sufficiency as instructors in matters of thought, and many more against the low and barbarous tone of their morale; the inhumanity and brutality of both their principles and their practice. All this might no doubt be very easily overdone, and would certainly be so if undertaken in the style of Professor Price's panegyric.
The Professor's third branch of the argument comes to the real point; namely, what is there in Greek and Latin that there is not in the modern tongues? For one thing, says the Professor, they are dead, which, of course, we allow. Then, being dead, they must be learned by book and by rule; they can not be learned by ear. Here, however, Professor Blackie would dissent, and would say that the great improvement of teaching, on which the salvation of classical study now hangs, is to make it a teaching by the ear. But, says Professor Price, "a Greek or Latin sentence is a nut with a strong shell concealing the kernel—a puzzle, demanding reflection, adaptation of means to end, and labor for its solution, and the educational value resides in the shell and in the puzzle." As this strain of remark is not new, there is nothing new to be said in answer to it. Such puzzling efforts are certainly not the rule in learning Latin and Greek. Moreover, the very same terms would describe what may happen equally often in reading difficult authors in French, German, or Italian. Would not the pupil find puzzles and difficulties in Dante or in Goethe? And are there not many puzzling exercises in deciphering English authors? Besides, what is the great objection to science, but that it is too puzling for minds that are quite competent for the puzzles of Greek and Latin. Once more, the teaching of any language must be very imperfect, if it brought about habitually such situations of difficulty as are here described.
The Professor relapses into a cooler and correcter strain when he remarks that the pupil's mind is necessarily more delayed over the expression of a thought in a foreign language (whether dead or alive matters not), and therefore remembers the meaning better. Here, however, the desiderated reform of teaching might come into play.
