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goes to Paris he will be able to go to a hotel and make known his wants without becoming a laughing-stock to everybody; but this would be too useful, and therefore this must be put aside for some discipline in the Greek language, which he is sure to forget before he is thirty. It depends upon what you mean to make men. If you want to make them a race of sophists, poetasters, and schoolmasters, we are going about it in the right way; but for the business of life we have a little too much Latin and Greek, and if we are to have them taught, they ought to be taught on a very different system. There is nothing more absurd than to attempt to untie knots that have never been tied. If language had been made on a set of general principles—if it had been laid down by the wise men of all nations that the nominative should always agree with the verb, and a verb should always govern the accusative—and language had been made like Euclid—every one of these rules which had been tied we could untie, and a language having been put together in that way we could analyse it into rules. But, gentlemen, language was not so made. Language grew we know not how—like a tree or a plant; it was not made under general rules, and therefore, when you are trying to form general rules for it, you are sowing the sand—you will never attain to what you want; and the result is that when you come to reflect, you will find that you have wasted much time, and the best years of your life have been made miserable by studying rules, whose exceptions are often as numerous as their illustrations, and of which you never know whether they apply or not.
Well, then, gentlemen, there is another thing I enter my protest against, and that is Latin verses. I do not think the history of poets is so prosperous that the end and object of mankind should be to make as many young people as possible poetasters. One of the least profitable of the little talents that a man can have is that of scribbling verses, and yet years of our lives are taken up in the attempt to teach us to write Latin verses, which, after all, are a mere cento of expressions stolen from different authors, the meaning of which we may not
