about the relief of the town." Sex iam menses durante obsidione, ita ut frumentum deficeret, consul Capua egressus oppido ferre auxilium paravit. Note as logic how vague and even inaccurate the English is. The main thought 'set about' is actually in a subordinate sentence, and even there nothing in the grammar indicates that it is more important than ‘left.' "The siege had lasted . . .” and "food-supplies were running low," are constructed as two main verbs, as though they were of equal importance in the thought. But Latin sifts them all out, seizes the main thought and puts it, as the conclusion and sum of the whole, in the last sentence, and then arrays the other clauses in their due and logical subordination. It need not be pointed out that the study of a language like this is a good mental discipline, an exercise in precise expression, in correct dissection of thought.

No other language, least of all a modern language, has this rigid logical cast. Greek itself has not got it. From Greek we learn a different kind of accuracy. It is less logical, but more sensitive. Think, for instance, of its wealth of particles kai, dn, ye, dé and the rest, which can express on paper shades of sarcasm, scepticism and emphasis that we express by an inflection of the voice, and

that our written language requires some awkward periphrases to render. (ai dǹ yvvaîkes is Xenophon's way of describing the men in female dress, who were introduced into the Cadmeia to kill the Spartan harmost; try to put this into English and note how much more clumsy is our corresponding expression.) Think of its two negatives, one for facts, the other for conceptions and ideas; of its verb, with three moods where we have two, and with a subjunctive and optative for expressing different shades of unreality or uncertainty, where the most flexible modern language has only one. English says: "If you go, I will follow "; Latin, more logical, says: "If you shall have come, I will follow." Greek by its optative allows us to express the greater or less probability of the event in question (ἔαν ἔλθῃς or εἰ ἔλθοις). In fact, compared to any other Western language, Greek is like an organ with more stops, or, if we want a prosaic comparison, like a typewriter with a bigger keyboard.

The topic requires a book; but these few pages will indicate roughly how the classical differ from modern languages and why the latter cannot really replace the former for the purpose we are considering. No doubt there are more important

things in education than the study of grammar; but it is not an overstatement to say that not to know Greek is to be ignorant of the most flexible and subtle instrument of expression which the human mind has devised, and not to know Latin is to have missed an admirable training in precise and logical thought.

What then are we to say of translating into and from Latin and Greek?

Before answering this I would call attention to a curious fact. These much abused exercises are singularly unerring tests of intellectual ability. I have heard a modern history tutor say that he would be ready to ignore the marks on the history papers in a scholarship examination, and elect on the results of Latin Prose and Unseen translations; and anyone who has had the misfortune to spend time in examining knows well that, when he comes to the Essays and General papers, he will find a very few first class papers which reveal the exceptionally able boy, and a fair number of bad ones which reveal the stupid and muddleheaded, but that the majority range from ẞ+ to ß, reaching a very fair level, but leaving him quite uncertain as to the real intellectual quality of the writers.

He will read them and become still more baffled, and then retire to the very dull business of examining minutely the proses and unseens. It will be rare that he completes this task without discovering which of the candidates who puzzled him have brighter imaginations or more accurate or more logical minds. That is a curious and suggestive fact.

In discussing the exact value of proses and translations, let us first deal with the elementary work done in lower forms. And here let me quote from an article by a science master. "The great majority of public school boys are not going to achieve the culture which is the goal of the classics, but neither are they any the more going to feel the moral exaltation of the trained researcher whose one desire is to know the truth. . . . It is that necessary power of intellectual concentration which the public schools must above all develop, and our business is to examine how best it can be done; whether or not this stage of education should be combined with vocational, and therefore specialised, training. The lessons we would teach are not, of course, purely intellectual; they must needs carry a host of moral qualities with them (concentration is itself on the borderland of morals) and perhaps the whole training is better described as the power

of 'sticking' to a task, if need be, in the face of difficulties and discouragement. One thing, more-| over, is certain, vocational equipment may come later, but concentration, if not acquired by the age of seventeen, is little likely to be won at all. No medium for education can be judged as to its power of developing this quality of concentration apart from the way in which it works out in practice when large classes of boys have to be dealt with. There is little doubt that the reason why the classics have held their place in education is just because they are peculiarly adapted for the efficient teaching of boys collectively. A piece of English is set to be turned into Latin. The task involves concentration, close attention to detail, and considerable logical reasoning; there are no short cuts, no formulae as in the science problem, the reasoning involved cannot be avoided by mere effort of memory as in the writing-out of a proposition in geometry; finally, the task when done can be quickly checked and the care taken very fairly judged." 1

The commonsense of this is obvious; and anyone who will try to substitute geography, history

1 Science and the Public Schools, by D. R. Pye (Physics Master at Winchester), Nineteenth Century, July, 1916.