NEGATIVE ARTICLE.-I.

"What can men worse for mortal brain contrive
Than thus a hard dead language to revive?
Heavens! if a language once be fairly dead,
Let it be buried, not preserved and read;
The bane of every boy to decent station bred.
If any good these crabbed books contain,
Translate them well, and let them there remain.
To one huge vault convey the useless store,
Then lose the key-and never find it more.'

Crabbe.

MODERN thought and modern life differ entirely in their circumstances and forms from those of the ancient civilizations. Education, manufactures, travel, books, and all the surroundings of existence are changed for us. The universal slave life in the countries of the olden time has now been commuted into free labour. The relations of men as clients and dependants, as nobles and serfs, are wholly altered-even America and Russia having consented at last to the inevitable tendencies of modern civilization. The condition of women, in all its forms and shapes, has undergone quite a new development; and the ancients could not even comprehend how society could co-exist with the freedom allowed to the women of our age. The social economy of the race has been reformed, and the commercial connections of nations have been brought into harmony with other principles of life than those which were possible in the days of old. The religious truths of the chief portions of the race have been, by divine inspiration, re-arranged and altogether renewed. These are, we presume, the chief elements of man's life. As these, therefore, have been so completely and thoroughly altered, remodelled, and revised, it can scarcely be doubted that the system of education which compels the brightest and best days of scholars to be spent in the study of those old times in which the thoughts of the ancients are contained, or their doings recorded, is a mistake and an anomaly. As time has changed all things around us, it is scarcely conceivable why education alone should stand stock-still, and a course of training which suited the Middle Ages should still be considered an adequate and complete equipment for the business of modern life. The conservatism of idleness in teachers and of do-nothing-ism in corporations seems, alone to be to blame; for we find all men now gaining by some means an education different from that which the schools afford, and compelled to forget all the traditional lore of Greece and Rome painfully gained at school, in the effort to attain the additional information suitable for the present day and its demands.

With modern life, too, there has arisen a modern literature of such vastness, excellence, and adaptation to the human needs of the ages that now are, that the lifetime of ordinary men is not enough to afford them opportunity of acquainting themselves with the contents of the miles of literary treasures the libraries of

modern times present for perusal. It seems to be quite preposterous that men should spend their time, and energy, and thought in the most receptive years of their youth and manhood in gaining a knowledge of effete thoughts and bygone activities, while the very labour and time spent in making the acquisitions prevent them from feeding their souls on the suitable nourishment which the great thinkers among the moderns has supplied. The choice of the less worth and the more laboriously acquired as that upon which the force and time of education ought to be expended, seems to be not injudicious only, but unwise. In British education, in a land where life is so real and time so precious, it seems a singularly misplaced choice.

It is true that "the process of construing" is an excellent praxis in patience, and induces a stubborn endurance of unpleasantnesses; but we cannot see for the life of us why we might not advantageously have less of Latin and more of English grammar, less of Grecian and more of German construing; some Milton as well as some Homer; a little Dante along with our Virgil; a study of Shakspere as well as of Sophocles, of Pope along with Horace, of Bacon with Aristotle, and of Goethe as well as Plato. If there is an advantage in walking through the darksome glades of classical literature, there surely would be some benefit attainable from an excursion into the fine open country of British letters. Classics, as they predominate in British education, are in their wrong place. They ought not to occupy, at the utmost, more than an equal share in the days laborious of school and college training. At present they have usurped at least a seventh part of the longest life to themselves; and even these are most ineffectively known; but this is far too much, because it compels most men to exile themselves from the home literature of their own land. If we reflect upon the great waste of thought enforced in most scholastic establishments in the attempt to grind into each boy a certain minimum quantity of Latin and Greek-in the compulsory acquisition of a given amount of practical facility in the use of the particles of the ancient tongues, of Latin prosody, and of Greek accentuation-and in the endeavour to call back the living thought of boyhood-all excitement in regard to the vital universe around him-to the dull and verbose rules of syntax of the tongues of times of which he desires to take no heed, and which have no charms for him in boyhood, and little utility for him in manhood's struggles with the needs of every day; we can scarcely do otherwise than aver that the classics do not hold their proper place in British education, but that they ought to be displaced from their throne of universal pre-eminence, and be set upon a lower level; as well as have a more confined range of subjects, and compelled to submit to the thraldom they impose.

The languages of the classics are properly called dead. Why should the study of dead anatomical forms of speech form the chief employment of the vigour and life of modern youths? Why

should the dissecting-table be so much more advocated in modern training than the gymnasium? The Greeks and Romans themselves acted more wisely than we; they trained their children for the life they were to lead and prepared them for taking a wholesome part in the entire existence of the times. We, on the contrary, drill our youth upon the arts of life of a bygone age; train them to know all the history and mystery of the heathenism of ancient times, but leave them ignorant of the physiology of their own frames, the political economy of their own days, the history of their own land, and the literature of their own land's language. Hence study becomes a weariness to the flesh, and immediately on emancipation the scholar betakes himself in the recoil to a course of sensation novel reading.

It may be good to know the fate of Greece and the events of the republic of Rome; and to have an acquaintance with the ideas of the great thinkers of those states and nations; but is it not too dearly purchased at the price of ignorance of the emancipated and enlarged world of Luther, Columbus, and Shakspere; of the republic which gave mankind Cromwell and Milton; of the sighing exit of feudalism of Sir Walter Scott; and the reorganization of European society which bring into view at once Goethe and Napoleon, Peel and Tennyson, Lamartine and Guizot, Stanley, Shaftesbury, Gladstone, and Bright? Is it of greater importance to know the sum of wisdom in Aristotle, or the end of wisdom in Scripture the ars artium of the ancients, than the whole circle of new and living art the result of modern times? Is the science of the old world alone worthy of study, and must that of the new world of our own times be altogether ignored? Must we study Greek and Roman classics only, and neglect the classics of Britain, Germany, Italy, and France?

"From education, as the leading cause,

The public character its colours draws:

Thence the prevailing manners take their cast."

Hence I would have education brought more into its living connection with modern life, and with the Christianity which has made that life what it is. To do this it would be requisite to give our youths an early training in English literature, and in all the useful instruments of education-reading, writing, arithmetic, mathematics, and the general nature of words and their uses; then should commence the teaching of modern and ancient languages, according to the bent of the individual mind and the requirements of his station; for we really "do amise," as Milton says, "to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year." Let us reform our plan of education, and bring it more into conformity with British needs than scholastic sloth seems inclined to do.

And what is the result?

"The flowers of classic genius,"

says Sir Walter Scott, stating his own experience, "have been rendered degraded, in his imagination, by their connection with tears, with errors, and with punishments; so that the Eclogues of Virgil and the Odes of Horace are each inseparably allied in association with the sullen figure and monotonous recitation of some blubbering schoolboy." And what sort of a man does this training produce? Let J. R. Lowell give answer:—

"A reading-machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing;
Appeared in a gown and a vest of black satin,
To spout such a Gothic oration in Latin,

That Tully would never have made out a word in it
(Though himself was the model the author preferred in it),

And grasping the parchment which gave him in fee
All the mystic, and so forth, contained in

B,

He was launched (life is always compared to a sea),
With just enough learning, and skill for the using it,
To prove he'd a brain, by for ever confusing it.
So worthy St. Benedict, piously burning
With the holiest zeal against secular learning,
Nesciensque scienter, as writers express it,
Indoctusque sapienter a Roma recessit."

All the prizes in

Classics have a false start given them. academical halls are allotted to proficiency in them; most of the preferments in society are made to depend on the progress a man has made in classical acquirements; the traditions of our educational life are all in their favour. Yet year by year their influence is declining, and our scholarship is fading in these very matters in exact proportion as other studies having a natural interest for man are developing themselves. All the sciences are quick with modern life, all the forms of modern literature are bringing forth treasures of intellectual achievement, but classical learning has made no advancement since the days of Porson; and even Donaldson's merits were ignored by the traditionary schools of classicism. So sluggish and stagnant have become the great halls of learning in regard to that even which they hold to be the chief effort of "intellectual being." It is time this subject was seriously considered. Education commissions are sitting-or are about to sitin England and Scotland. Let them, if they wish to learn the truth, examine the great body of the middle classes, and they will hear it universally advanced that the place in British education held by the classics is far too high, while the attainments in them made by scholars are far too low. If by so doing they should be led to reform our public schools, it would be well. We e hope this debate will somewhat tend to this end, and that through some means or other the classics may be brought to their proper place in British education. We thank the editor for bringing it forth for discussion so opportunely, and hope it will be argued as becomes the importance of the question. G. C. S. K.

Toiling Upward.

DR. JOHN WILLIAM DONALDSON.

"GREAT men bave been among us;" but, sad to say, we have too frequently ignored the fact till "vixerunt" is pronounceable over their graves. The earnestly pursued aims of a man have been rightly, as we think, chosen by the writers of the papers in this series as better evidences of human greatness than mere external successes. Aims are the issues of a man's own soul; successes are complex phenomena into which there enter as factors outward circumstances as well as personal characteristics and bodily health. To plan and labour are the duties of man-in these he can always succeed; but the success of schemes belongs to powers beyond human control.

"'Tis not in mortals to command success,
They may do more,--deserve it.”

The higher life is that of aim and effort. Strife is humanity's fate. To take a noble part in that strife is man's glory. The vanquished in a righteous cause possesses a purer renown than the victor in a career of selfish aggrandizement. What is the fame of an allconquering despot compared with that of an all-enduring martyr? Sacrifice is holier than success. True "toiling upwards" is the toil of character, of pure endeavour, of ardently pursued achievement. What is commonly called "the main chance" is in reality the most frequent source of human beguilement. Man's main chance is to be a man, not to have for a brief term some worldly possessions much coveted by man. Goodness is greatness.

The

The external test usually employed to judge of " success in life" is the most fallacious of all fallacies. Not by its visible gains, but by true personal growth, is genuine success measurable. motives from which a man acts, the purpose which he attempts to accomplish, the life-plan on which he fashions his individual schemes, must all be known before we can reckon whether, or in what measure, success has been attained. The concrete standard, the coinage test is false. That man is successful, whatever be the outward circumstances of his lot, whose life becomes inwoven with the texture of the world's ongoings, and helps to bring to pass the loftier destiny of humanity. Life is man's supreme wealth. A time comes to all when life passes into eternity-whither alone life, not life's earnings, enters. None of the glorious accidents of title. fortune, estate, rank, keen-grasped gain, or majesty of power, will accompany the soul in its journey of death; only the fulness of life