Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/586

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a perfect organ of expression, showing essentially the same qualities which appear in the best Greek art.

A Popular Study of Greek.

We ought all to rejoice, then, in the remarkable success of a new experiment in teaching that language, which has arisen out of the work of this Society. Classes have lately been formed for the study of Greek, and students who had enjoyed no previous advantages of instruction in the language, but whose interest in it had been quickened by lectures on the literature, have shown a zeal and made a progress of which their teachers have reason to be proud. I would venture to commend this new enterprise to the sympathies of all who are interested in classical studies, or indeed in literary studies of any kind. To my thinking, it is a movement of great importance, which is very likely to mark the beginning of a time when a first-hand knowledge of Greek shall be more widely diffused. It would be a notable and fruitful result if, as these new classes seem to promise, the interest felt in the Greek language should grow into anything that could fairly be described as a popular interest,—so that considerable numbers of students, outside of our great schools and Universities, should set themselves to acquire the power of reading the Greek literature in the original. I do not think that such a hope is chimerical, in view of what has already been accom-