Mill in his celebrated St. Andrew's discourse; in both cases we are presented with a grand picture of the intellectual advantages derivable from the acquisition of many languages, and their comprehensive philosophical study. Against this, as we have often said, there is, in itself, nothing to urge. It is an entirely proper thing for men of capacity, whose tastes lead them in this direction, to give their lives to linguistic philosophy, and the acquirement of many languages. But, for ordinary students in college, this is simply futile and impossible, and we have here the perpetual fallacy of the advocates of classical studies. Experience in the universities of all countries and for centuries, and everywhere attested to-day, assures us that this ideal classical accomplishment is not attained, nor anything approaching it. Mr. Freeman says: "If Greek and Latin study could never come to anything more than that kind of scholarship which in its highest form corrected the text of a Greek play and made Greek iambics and Latin elegiacs—which in its lowest form turned out that fearful form of bore which is ready at every moment with a small scrap of Horace or Virgil—if this is all that comes of Greek and Latin study, we might be tempted to say. Perish Greek and Latin study!" But what else do we get, or can we get, but that sort of scholarship from the great mass of students in colleges? He thinks that teaching can be improved so as to yield better results, but that has been the illusion of hundreds of years. The failure and defeat of classical studies has been the opprobrium of the universities for generations, and from the time of Milton to the present there have been loud calls for reform and improvement in the modes of classical instruction; but the changes have not come, and the old results continue, nor is any such reform possible. The vice of our system of higher studies is the enormous disproportion between the study of language and the period allowed for education, or even the common length of life. Mr. Freeman says: "I believe, then, that if we can only learn all tongues in a rational way, we may keep our Greek and our Latin, and bring in our German, our French, our Italian, above all our English, in their due places alongside of them." Two results must ever follow from the attempt to realize any such ideas in practice: First, such a predominance of lingual study must effectually exclude all other most important subjects from the curriculum; and, second, the acquisition of the languages themselves will generally be so miserably imperfect that the higher ends aimed at will not be reached. At the foundation this acquisition of languages is a problem of cerebral dynamics. The learning of a language exhausts a very considerable portion of the plastic power of the brain. The acquisition of six languages is, of course, a still more enormous draft upon the cerebral energy, and there must be very considerable native capacity if so many forms of speech are thoroughly acquired so as to be brought into relations of critical comparison for philological purposes. Not one student in twenty, nor indeed one in a hundred, will ever do this, and the great mass of them will fall so lamentably short of it that the time given to the study is essentially wasted. Let languages, ancient and modern, living and dead, be pursued to any extent by those who are drawn to the study and propose to devote themselves to this line of scholarship. What we protest against, and what the common sense of the age undoubtedly condemns, is this tenacious and self-defeating ascendancy of extinct languages in the higher education of our youth at large.
We say "extinct" languages, but Mr. Freeman does not like this idea at all. He objects to regarding Greek and Latin as "dead, ancient, classical." He would abolish the current distinction
