Page:Under Dispute (1924).pdf/291

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prose and verse are emancipated from the splendid shackles they wore with such composure. But the mere reader, who is not an educational economist, asks himself now and then in what fashion Milton and Dryden would have written, if vocational training had supplanted the classics in their day. And to come nearer to our time, and closer to our modern and moderate appreciations, how would the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and the lines "On the Death of a Favourite Cat" have been composed, had Gray not spent all his life in the serene company of the Latins?

It was easy to define the requirements of an educated man in the year 1738, when Gray, a bad mathematician and an admirable classicist, left Cambridge. It is uncommonly difficult to define them to-day. Dr. Goodnow, speaking a few years ago to the graduating class of Johns Hopkins University, summed