beautiful under these circumstances. The ordinary school-boy is
precisely in this case. He finds Parnassus uncommonly steep, and there
is no chance of his having much time or inclination to look about him
till he gets to the top. And nine times out of ten he does not get to
the top.

But if this be a fair picture of the results of classical teaching at
its best--and I gather from those who have authority to speak on such
matters that it is so--what is to be said of classical teaching at its
worst, or in other words, of the classics of our ordinary middle-class
schools[2]? I will tell you. It means getting up endless forms and rules
by heart. It means turning Latin and Greek into English, for the mere
sake of being able to do it, and without the smallest regard to the
worth, or worthlessness, of the author read. It means the learning of
innumerable, not always decent, fables in such a shape that the meaning
they once had is dried up into utter trash; and the only impression left
upon a boy's mind is, that the people who believed such things must have
been the greatest idiots the world ever saw. And it means, finally, that
after a dozen years spent at this kind of work, the sufferer shall be
incompetent to interpret a passage in an author he has not already got
up; that he shall loathe the sight of a Greek or Latin book; and that he
shall never open, or think of, a classical writer again, until,
wonderful to relate, he insists upon submitting his sons to the same
process.

These be your gods, O Israel! For the sake of this net result (and
respectability) the British father denies his children all the knowledge
they might turn to account in life, not merely for the achievement of
vulgar success, but for guidance in the great crises of human existence.
This is the stone he offers to those whom he is bound by the strongest