mastery of India, and at length on the humble field of Wandewash, Colonel Coote made you English subjects and English students. I contend that you have no reason to regret it. The merits of French. French is still the common language for men of culture in all countries. It surpasses all in lucidity. It is a perfect vehicle of exposition and argument. It contains many master-pieces in every province of literature. It is still used in my opinion with increasing beauty and power, and France vies with Germany and England in sending every^ year to the press works of science, fancy, criticism, and research. The springs of national genius and power are unimpaired. France thinks and writes, and creates and agitates. But this dazzling ascendancy must not blind us to the poverty of the future. The area of French activity, though brilliant, is circumscribed. England not only thinks and writes and works, but expands and multiplies unceasingly, embracing all the waste and empty places on the earth, filling them with a free healthy progressive population, rude it is true, at present, and absorbed in the conflict with material nature, but possessing all the slumbering instincts and elements of the highest culture. If India had received its European education from France, it would have remained attached to France, in contact and communion with France alone. Educated by England, India remains the political dependancy of a single European State, but it shares the intellectual fortunes of the United States and Australia, of more than half the civilized world that is to be.
In reference to the dead languages, I hold in the main the opinions which Mr. Norton has often expressed in public here. Latin and Greek. Latin and Greek falsely called dead, for they have long been our living tyrants, can only in exceptional cases be a proper study for the Indians. Most of what is beautiful and valuable in those languages has been poured into modern European literature. It is of the greatest importance that you should know what the Greeks and the Romans were, what they wrote, what they did, how they grew and fell, and what portions of their philosophy, poetry, jurisprudence and political institutions have passed into modern Society, but you can learn all this from English books or from books translated into English from German and French. The searching light of modern philology and criticism has dissolved the fables of the ancients. Standing on the vantage ground of distance and comprehensive knowledge, we know the Greeks and Romans better than they knew themselves. To learn Latin and Greek in order to understand them would be