THE CLASSICS.

Now that both sides of the question as to the utility of a classical education have been so ably set forth by President Porter and Charles Francis Adams, it is both interesting and important to note the opinions of a leading English scholar, Rev. Frederick W. Farrar, on the same point. Especially is this so since it has been claimed that the 'American standard of classical Knowledge is low and that we must go where the system has been more faithfully tried for the highest evidence of its advantages.' There could be no better field from which to gain this evidence than England, for her universities and her schools have for centuries been almost exclusively under the classical system. Canon Farrar gives his views on the present value of the system in the following words : "I must, then. avow my own deliberate opinion, arrived at in the teeth of the strongest possible bias and prejudice in the opposite direction arrived at with the fullest possible knowledge of every single argument which may be urged on the other side I must avow my distinct conviction that our present system of exclusively classical education, as a whole, and carried out as we do carry it out, is a deplorable failure. I say it, knowing that the words are strong words, but not without having considered them well; and I say it because that system has been 'weighed in the balance and found wanting.' It is no epigram, but a simple fact, to say that classical education neglects all the powers of some minds, and some of the powers of all minds. In the case of the few it has a balue which, being partial, is unsatisfactory; in the case of the vast multitude it ends in irremediable waste. To myself, trained in the system for years, and training others in it for years being one of those who succeeded in it, if that amount of progress which has been thought worthy of high classical honors in two university may be called success-influenced, therefore, by every conceivable prejudice of authority, experience and personal vanity in its favor. I can only give my emphatic conclusion that every year the practice of it appears to me increasingly deplorable, and the theory of it every year increasingly absurd."

So much for the English system, which has been held by President Porter to be better than our own in several respects. As to the result of the system Canon Farrar goes on to say : "This is the sort of 'kelp and brick dust' used to polish the cogs of their mental machinery ! And when, for a good decade of human life, and those its most invaluable years, a boy has stumbled on this dreadful mill-round, without progressing a single step, and is plucked at his matriculation for Latin prose, we flatter ourselves, forsooth, that we have been giving him the best means for learning Latin quotations, for improving taste (or what passes for such) for acquiring the niceties of Greek and Latin scholarship ! We resent the nickname of the 'Chinese of Europe,' yet our education offers the closest possible analogue to that which reigus in the Celestial Empire, and for centuries we have continued, and are continuing, a system to which (so far as I know) no other civilized nation attaches any importance, yet which leaves us to borrow our scholarship second-hand from them; which is now necessary for the very highest classical honors at the University of Cambridge alone; in which only one has a partial glimmering of success for lumdreds and hundreds who inevitable fail; and in which the few exceptional successes are so flagrantly useless that they can only be regarded at the best as a somewhat trivial and fantastic accomplishment an accomplishment so singularly barren of all results that it has scarcely produced a dozen original poems on which the world sets the most trifling value; while we waste years in thus perniciously fostering idle verbal imitations, and in neglecting the rich fruit of ancient learning for its bitter useless and unwholesome husk-while we thus dwarf many a vigorous intellect, and disgust many a manly mind while a great university, neglecting in large neasure the literature and the philosophy of two leading nations, contents itself with being, in the words of one of its greatest sons, 'a bestower of rewards for schoolboy merit'-while thousands of despairing boys thus waste their precious hours in 'contracting their own views and deadening their own sensibilities' by a failure in the acquisition of the useless-while we apply this inconceivably irrational process to Greek and Latin, and to no other language ever taught under the sun-while we thus accumulate instruction without education, and feel no shame or compunction if at the end of many years we thrust our youth, in all their unwarned ignorance, through the open gate of life-while, I say, such a system as this continues and flourishes, which most practical men have long scorned with an immeasurable contempt, do not let us consider that we have advanced a single step in reforming education, to reform which, in the words of Leibnitz, is to reform society and to reform mankind."