Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 3.djvu/263

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OF EDUCATION
255

the state. After this they are to dive into the ground of law and legal justice; delivered first, and with best warrant by Moses; and as far as human prudence can be trusted, in those extolled remains of Grecian lawgivers, Lycurgus, Solon, Zalcucus, Charoudas,[1] and thence to all the Roman edicts and tables with their Justinian; and so down to the Saxon and common laws of England, and the statutes. Sundays also and every evening may be now understandingly spent in the highest matters of theology, and church history ancient and modern: and ere this time the Hebrew tongue at a set hour might have been gained, that the Scriptures may be now read in their own original; whereto it would be no impossibility to add the Chaldey,[2] and the Syrian[3] dialect. When all these employments are well conquered, then will the choice histories, heroic poems, and Attic tragedies of stateliest and most regal argument, with all the famous political orations offer themselves; which if they were not only read; but some of them got by memory, and solemnly pronounced with right accent, and grace, as might be taught, would endow them even with the spirit and vigor of Demosthenes or Cicero, Euripides, or Sophocles. And now lastly will be the time to read with them those organic[4] arts which enable men to discourse and write perspicuously, elegantly, and according to the fitted style of lofty, mean, or lowly. Logic therefore so much as is useful, is to be referred to this due place with all her well couched[5] heads and topics, until to be time to open her contracted palm into a graceful and ornate rhetoric taught out of the rule of Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus. To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate. I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar; but that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a

  1. Lawgivers respectively to Sparta, Athens, the Locrians in southern Italy, and certain cities in Sicily
  2. Chaldean, a language akin to Hebrew.
  3. Aramaic, the language of Palestine in the time of Christ.
  4. Practical.
  5. Arranged.