were advanced and eager reformers, who, by their general habit of mind, apart from their particular complaints against the classics, were unlikely to feel any prejudice in favour of tradition,—were apt to be sceptical, or even scornful, of anything alleged on behalf of the humanities which appeared to them sentimental or conventional,—and were little disposed to conserve any element in education to which they could not assign a definite rational value. As a typical expression of those tendencies, one might mention the volume of "Essays on a Liberal Education," published in 1867.
In the sixties, then, considering the strength of the attack both from without and from within, the position of humane studies was certainly more seriously imperilled than it had ever been before. Not, indeed, that even then there was any danger of their being discarded at once. But there was a danger of another kind. Some influential men were saying, "Keep Latin if you like, but drop Greek, or reserve it for a few boys; and take care that the classics do not, in any case, trench upon the time which should, in all schools, be given to natural science and to modern studies." The danger was lest the powerful alliance between insurgent men of science and disaffected humanists, aided by the legions of Philistia, should force on a movement for imposing such restrictions as these in a spirit altogether favourable to the new studies, but unfriendly to the old;—with the result that classical studies might be so narrowed, so hampered, so
