have been guilty of his chief literary faults. This is not certain,
for some modern men of letters deeply read in Greek have all the
qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised.
Greek will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is
certain; but it may, at least, help to restrain effusive and
rhetorical gabble. Our Asiatic rhetoricians might perhaps be even
more barbarous than they are if Greek were a sealed book to them.
However this may be, it is, at least, well to find out in a school
what boys are worth instructing in the Greek language. Now, of
their worthiness, of their chances of success in the study, Homer
seems the best touchstone; and he is certainly the most attractive
guide to the study.

At present boys are introduced to the language of the Muses by
pedantically written grammars, full of the queerest and most arid
metaphysical and philological verbiage. The very English in which
these deplorable books are composed may be scientific, may be
comprehensible by and useful to philologists, but is utterly heart-
breaking to boys.

Philology might be made fascinating; the history of a word, and of
the processes by which its different forms, in different senses,
were developed, might be made as interesting as any other story of
events. But grammar is not taught thus: boys are introduced to a
jargon about matters meaningless, and they are naturally as much
enchanted as if they were listening to a chimaera bombinans in
vacuo. The grammar, to them, is a mere buzz in a chaos of nonsense.
They have to learn the buzz by rote; and a pleasant process that is-
-a seductive initiation into the mysteries. When they struggle so
far as to be allowed to try to read a piece of Greek prose, they are