career which he might choose in life. At a time when the sciences which teach us to know the world in which we live were still in their infancy; when the studies by which the mind is trained to high, strict, and fearless thinking were as yet undeveloped; when history was still only a record of curious and entertaining incidents in war and diplomacy; when modern civil institutions were yet in many respects below the standard of the ancients, and still on the same military basis; when no notion of law had yet found footing in the conception of society; — at such a time no doubt study of classical types and models was valuable; ideas were obtained from an old treasure-house which could not have been obtained from the experience of actual life; literary culture was the only possible discipline; grammar stood first as a training in thought and expression; formal logic was a practical tool; perhaps even introspective metaphysics was not entirely a scholastic and dialectic exercise. In those times a young man who possessed a classical education, with a few touches of metaphysics and theology to finish it off, was put on a true superiority to his uneducated contemporaries as regarded his stock of ideas, his powers of expression, his horizon of knowledge, and the general liberality of his attitude towards life. He felt this his whole life long. It made him earnestly grateful to the institution which had educated him. Every young man who grew up saw distinctly the superior advantages which a college man possessed, and, if he felt at all fit for it, was eager to win the same advantage. There certainly never has been, in the United States, any appreciation of the rose-water arguments about "culture" which are now put forward in defense of classical training. We, when we were boys, sought classical training because it was the training which then put the key of life in our
