what their genius consisted and what was their contribution to the world, he would give either no reply or a very inadequate one. In these respects he is as far behind a German undergraduate of the same age as in scholarship he is ahead of him. Thus in the chief purely classical examination of the University, as in its classical scholarship examinations, the weight is thrown heavily on the linguistic side of Latin and Greek.

This is still more so with the Ireland and Craven and Hertford scholarships, which, in journalistic language, are the 'blue ribbons' of classical attainment in Oxford, and which are won by the ablest classical scholars of the year. Take the first of these; it has ten papers: four of them are translation; four at least―generally five—are prose and verse composition; one is a general paper, including questions on all departments of classical study, grammar, inscriptions, textual criticism, history of scholarship, comparative philology, history of religion, literature, etc., etc. In other words, fourfifths, and often nine-tenths, of the examination are linguistic, and every other aspect of the classics is crowded into a single paper of three hours. Thus the crown and summit of our classical examinations demands practically nothing of the best students

we have, except to be able to translate into and from Greek and Latin. (As the papers are generally set, the best hope of succeeding with the unseens, is to have read, not whole authors, but picked passages, chosen for their difficulty and with a decided inclination to Callimachus and obscure Alexandrians, Statius, Pliny the Elder and other writers of the second and third rank.) And so an examination which might be used to encourage an undergraduate to get a wide survey of Greek and Latin culture, thought and literature, and a strong hold on their significance, serves simply to chain him to their purely linguistic aspects.

It is the English theory, or rather for in this country traditions take the place of theories-it is the English tradition, to attach great weight to scholarship, and it would be a serious mistake to suppose that this is wholly bad. On the contrary, it has great merits. For one thing, it is much to be able to translate easily and accurately what we read. For another, the hard thinking, the precise and careful weighing of words that it involves, are an excellent antidote to the flaccid habit of mind which comes from continually dealing with ideas, and against which in any reform we shall have to guard. Our big public schools have always driven

hard at translation and composition; they have taught boys really to know the languages-which is a great thing and in doing so they have obtained the mental by-products which result from linguistic training. Under iron discipline on a difficult material they have accustomed their pupils to hard and continuous work; and they have produced a certain fineness of perception and a habit of hard thinking, which follow constant attention to minutiae of scholarship, and the companionship of great writers and masters of form. This is a considerable achievement, both in itself and educationally. It has had, among other virtues, the great virtue of thoroughness: and though there may be better forms of education, there certainly are many worse. Its fruits are to be seen on the front benches of the Houses of Parliament and in the Civil Services; and whatever defects of character and will their occupants may have, no one would accuse them of sloppy intellects. They compare favourably with the governing bodies of other nations; and, on the whole, they are the products of the public schools, with their classical course. It would be a disaster if we went to the other extreme, neglected translation, displaced prose compositions, and went entirely for the study of

Realien; our education would then be more unsatisfactory than it is at present. But we might with advantage consider whether there is not something in the view that a boy's education should change materially as his mind develops, and that when his capacities allow, the balance should be shifted away from scholarship and grammar to giving him a real knowledge of the contents of his books, of the genius and personalities of his authors and of the nature and significance of Greek and Roman culture.

The remedy, especially in the schools, is not so much a big change of curriculum as a change of emphasis, less stress being laid on scholarship, more on the contents of the books.1 Verses might well go altogether. They have largely disappeared

1 At Oxford Honour Classical Moderations might be made a really excellent education, if proses were reduced to one, at most, a week, if the Demosthenes and Cicero were cut down, if the B, C and D groups in the present special books were remodelled on the lines of group A, or if the special books were arranged so as to form special subjects (such as The History of Roman Elegy with Propertius, Tibullus and some Ovid); more provision should be made for testing the knowledge of subjectmatter, and grammar and textual criticism should recede into separate, and optional, papers. The Ireland and Craven examination might be improved by devoting four of its ten papers to Realien.

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already, and many boys do not even offer them in scholarship examinations. The chief arguments for them are that they are a training in taste, that Dr. Arnold, after being against them, was converted to them when he went to Rugby, and that a great many boys enjoy doing them. But they are peculiar to this country; those who cannot do them are not visibly the worse for it; they distract the attention still further from Realien, and it is impossible not to feel that the three or more hours a week which they cost might be better spent. Further time might be gained by a reduction of proses. At present in most schools two proses are done a week, when for educational purposes one would be sufficient. They are set less on their own merits than because proses 'pay' in scholarship examinations; and though, for reasons given on page 227, I do not think that unseen translations into English can entirely replace them, I quite agree with Mr. Pickard-Cambridge1 that an increase of these (which would take much less time) at the expense of prose would be desirable. There is no better intellectual discipline and no better exercise in the choice of the right English word, than translations from Greek and Latin.

1 Education, Science and the Humanities.