It is wonderful how close a parallel to classical training could be made
out of that palæontology to which I refer. In the first place I could
get up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic in its terminology,
so altogether distasteful to the youthful mind, as to beat the recent
famous production of the head-masters out of the field in all these
excellences. Next, I could exercise my boys upon easy fossils, and bring
out all their powers of memory and all their ingenuity in the
application of my osteo-grammatical rules to the interpretation, or
construing, of those fragments. To those who had reached the higher
classes, I might supply odd bones to be built up into animals, giving
great honour and reward to him who succeeded in fabricating monsters
most entirely in accordance with the rules. That would answer to
verse-making and essay-writing in the dead languages.

To be sure, if a great comparative anatomist were to look at these
fabrications he might shake his head, or laugh. But what then? Would
such a catastrophe destroy the parallel? What think you would Cicero, or
Horace, say to the production of the best sixth form going? And would
not Terence stop his ears and run out if he could be present at an
English performance of his own plays? Would Hamlet, in the mouths of a
set of French actors, who should insist on pronouncing English after the
fashion of their own tongue, be more hideously ridiculous?

But it will be said that I am forgetting the beauty, and the human
interest, which appertain to classical studies. To this I reply that it
is only a very strong man who can appreciate the charms of a landscape,
as he is toiling up a steep hill, along a bad road. What with
short-windedness, stones, ruts, and a pervading sense of the wisdom of
rest and be thankful, most of us have little enough sense of the