any more than mathematical ideas admit of being made to seem
"extremely plausible." He who writes, and who may venture to offer
himself as an example, is naturally of a most slovenly and
slatternly mental habit. It is his constant temptation to "scamp"
every kind of work, and to say "it will do well enough." He hates
taking trouble and verifying references. And he can honestly
confess that nothing in his experience has so helped, in a certain
degree, to counteract those tendencies--as the labour of thoroughly
learning certain Greek texts--the dramatists, Thucydides, some of
the books of Aristotle. Experience has satisfied him that Greek is
of real educational value, and, apart from the acknowledged and
unsurpassed merit of its literature, is a severe and logical
training of the mind. The mental constitution is strengthened and
braced by the labour, even if the language is forgotten in later
life.

It is manifest, however, that this part of education is not for
everybody. The real educational problem is to discover what boys
Greek will be good for, and what boys will only waste time and
dawdle over it. Certainly to men of a literary turn (a very minute
percentage), Greek is of an inestimable value. Great poets, even,
may be ignorant of it, as Shakespeare probably was, as Keats and
Scott certainly were, as Alexandre Dumas was. But Dumas regretted
his ignorance; Scott regretted it. We know not how much Scott's
admitted laxity of style and hurried careless habit might have been
modified by a knowledge of Greek; how much of grace, permanence, and
generally of art, his genius might have gained from the language and
literature of Hellas. The most Homeric of modern men could not read
Homer. As for Keats, he was born a Greek, it has been said; but had
he been born with a knowledge of Greek, he never, probably, would