*

editions, (Crevier's for instance) twice, faithfully and laboriously, referring to the notes for an explanation of whatever may be obscure in the text, and reserving for future investigation and comparison those passages which he is unable immediately to understand, and we undertake to say, that by the time he shall have accomplished his task, all the difficulties that embarrassed and discouraged his early progress will have insensibly vanished from before him. Let him then proceed to read in the same manner all the writings of Cicero, but especially the Epistles, the Rhetorical works, and the more familiar treatises on philosophical subjects, devoting an hour every day to the drudgery of double translation, and he will find when he comes to extend his studies to other authors-Tacitus, Sallust, the Plinies, &c. that those passages which are obscure to him, will generally prove to have been the subject of dispute, even among veteran philologists. We are aware that this course requires great resolution and perseverance. No one, who has not experienced them himself, can have any adequate idea of the difficulties and discouragements that crowd about the threshold of these unaided studies. But labour is the price of all excellence, and it is fit that it should be so. It is by this discipline, and by this alone, that a thorough knowledge of any language, ancient or modern, or indeed of any thing else, can be acquired. Hac arte Pollux et vagus Hercules, &c. It was by such means that some of the most learned men of past times, Erasmus and Cujas for instance, self-taught scholars-the former in an age comparatively barbarous, the latter without the smallest assistance from any teacher-raised themselves to such a height of reputation, not only in divinity or the civil law, or in profound erudition generally, but also in the humbler capacity of linguists and philologers. It is vain to say that these are rare instances, and that it is unphilosophical to reason from exceptions. We deny the fact. The literary history of the last three centuries, and indeed of all ages, abounds with such examples, and even if it did not, no young man of a generous and aspiring mind ought to deem any thing impossible that has ever been accomplished by mortal man, especially if it be what is obviously due, not to the supposed inspirations of genius, but to mere dint of toil and perseverance.t

τῶν πόνων,

Πωλοῦσιν ἡμῖν πάντα τ ̓ ἀγαθὰ θεοί.

Epicharmus apud Xenophon: Memorab. 1. ii. c. 1.

+ The text is a paraphrase of a favorite maxim from Macchiavelli. Non sia pertanto nessuno che si sbigotisca di non potere conseguire quello che è stato conseguito da altri; perchè gli uomini (come nella prefazione nostra si disse) nacquero, vissero e morirono sempre con un medesimo ordine.-Discorsi.

We are not satisfied, therefore, with the manner in which Mr. Read accounts for the miserable defectiveness of our schooleducation. It is not sufficient to say, that "the task of elementary instruction, offering but limited returns of dignity or emolument, has been suffered to devolve from its legitimate functionaries on the adventurers of learning; who, feeling the sting of genius, have wrested some slender opportunities from niggard fortune, and seek an honorable barter of their limited acquirements for present support while pressing on in the paths of professional ambition." It is, indeed, a melancholy truth, that the education of our southern youth has been of late too often committed to these great men in transitu; but making all reasonable allowances for such cases, it still remains to be explained how it has happened that so many professors of Greek and Latin in our numerous American colleges, in possession of comfortable livings, and discharged from all other duties and engagements, have dozed over their sealed volumes in such stupid unaspiring ignorance-how so many schoolmasters, in New-England for instance, looking to nothing beyond success as teachers in this elementary department, have been satisfied to "barter" (how "honorably" is none of our concern) for competent fees and a precious period of their pupils lives, such a wretched, vulgar, and worthless smattering of classical literature-how all, emphatically all, the attainments of a young man liberally, that is, expensively educated from his seventh or eighth to his fourteenth or fifteenth year, have been, with very few, if any, exceptions, limited to what is ironically called translating the ancient authors; in other words, rendering into uncouth or nonsensical English the most exquisite beauties of poetry and eloquence, without so much as the remotest idea, of what it is that has recommended to the admiration of all ages, those "Delphic lines," whose unspeakable harmony he utterly destroys by a barbarous pronunciation*-above all, how the most frugal, money-making, managing, practical people in the world have quietly sate down under such enormous abuses, and borne, for no solitary good purpose that we are able to discover, a burthen of taxation that could only have been supportable

* We mean, of course, the attainments for which he is indebted to the school master and the school. In addition to the New-England authorities, cited in the next note, we beg leave to refer our readers to the 7th No. of the (Boston) Journal of Education, p. 409, where the writer, after presenting a view of the exercises exacted at the public examinations of the English universities, adds, "at the period when we were at our own Cambridge, the very idea of performing such exercises would have petrified both student and preceptor." As well it might! We add for ourselves, 'experto crede Ruperto."

because it was self-imposed. Now we freely admit that Mr. Grimké is in the right, if he means, as we are more than half inclined to suspect that he does, this system of classical studies, and we scruple not to say, that we should most heartily co-operate with him in his efforts to explode it as soon as possible, as a criminal waste of a period of life, every moment of which ought to be sacred to improvement, if we did not, think that we could even now descry above the verge of our horizon, the first flush of a kindling zeal and the dawn of a brighter hope.

The extent of our subject, and the limits within which we are constrained to circumscribe the present discussion of it, make it impossible for us to say more of the very sensible and well written discourse of our late fellow-townsman, Mr. Adams, than that it exhibits an outline of the course of studies to be pursued at Geneva college in the state of New-York, together with a concise and comprehensive sketch of the recent improvements and present state of mathematical and physical science. As his opinions upon the subject of classical learning agree with our own, we hope he will be successful at once in making proselytes to his theory, and (what will be still better) living examples of its beneficial effects. One circumstance we cannot help remarking by the way, and that is, the great demand which from the case of this gentleman and from some others of a similar kind, we infer to exist in all parts of the United States, for the talents of able instructors of youth-to which, we may add, the evidence which such instances afford, amidst all the glaring imperfections of our system of elementary education, that the love-or as it would be more forcibly as well as accurately expressed in French, the besoin-of knowledge, is an essential element of the national character, and one of the "canon laws of our foundation." Mr. Adams was called from the Charleston college, of which he was the principal, to preside over an institution of a similar, or even a still more important character, in the flourishing town of Geneva-a town, which is itself but a creation of yesterday, and in a country which has burst out upon our sight with all its rapidly increasing prosperity, and population, and improvements, with an unparalleled and almost magical suddenness.

This last notion may be found in an article of Blackwood's Magazine for February or March, 1819, which was written by a New-England scholar, a gentleman who is now endeavouring to improve the wretched system which he then censured with such just severity. As exception may be taken in certain quarters to what we have said of New-England schoolmasters, whom we mention because they might be expected to be the best, we refer, further, to. Professor Tichnor, who will be allowed, we presume, to speak en connaissance de cause.-See his Remarks, &c. 1825.

It is now time to proceed to the subject of our controversy with Mr. Grimké. Two distinct questions are involved in it :first, what are the merits of the Greek and Roman classics, considered merely as works of art, and as models for imitation; and, secondly, how far it is worth while, under existing circumstances, to study them, and more especially, to make them an essential part of a regular academic education. It is obviously impossible to do any thing like justice to the former question, (or indeed to either of them) in a single dissertation, that shall not run out to the size of a bulky volume. We purpose, accordingly, to illustrate and enforce our opinion upon the various subjects which it embraces, in a series of articles that shall appear, as occasion serves, in our future numbers. In the present instance, we shall confine ourselves, principally, to the business of refutation. We shall accept the issues which Mr. Grimké and other writers have recently tendered to the advocates of classical literature, and endeavour to shew that if this good cause is (quod Deus avertat omen) destined to be defeated before the enlightened tribunal of public opinion in this country, it will, at least, not be owing to the unanswerable force of these new arguments. We will fearlessly say of it, what has been said (if we recollect right) of the fifth book of Euclid's Elements, that "it has weathered the vicissitudes of opinion for 2000 years, and notwithstanding this new attack, we still conclude, as Barrow did more than one hundred years ago, nisi machinis validioribus impulsa, in æternum durabit."*

But we must take the liberty of entering a preliminary caveat against any use, on the part of Mr. Grimké, of the authority of great names. As we are well aware that we shall have to do, through him, with a sort of illuminati, that consider all those by whose opinions we should, otherwise, be most desirous of fortifying our own, as inadmissible, because interested witnesses; and moreover, as men grievously abused by the delusions of a superstition altogether unworthy of this enlightened and philosophic age; we have no objection to dispense, on this occasion, with the services of our natural auxiliaries, but we must insist, at least, upon meeting our adversaries upon equal terms. In the forum of letters, whatever it may be in a court of law, we see no reason why ignorance should not be just as fatal to the competency of evidence, to say the least of it, as a very slight or rather perfectly ideal interest; and if we are fastidious enough to except to the only persons that know any thing about the matter, under the idea that their knowledge itself infers some bias, we

fear we shall scarcely be consistent with ourselves, unless we exclude those also who are, most probably, so little acquainted with the subject of the controversy that their testimony must necessarily be made up of vague hearsay and wild conjecture. We do, therefore, in the first place, solemnly protest against all and singular, the sentences in a certain note of Mr. Grimké's, beginning with "Dr. Dwight was wont to say; or "the author of the British Spy hath said;" or even, "the younger Lord Lyttleton (in Letters, by the bye, which he did not write) has not hesitated to say," &c. Dr. Timothy Dwight we have always been taught to consider as a very able man, especially in theology-and we have not the least doubt, that the present Attorney General of the United States is quite a formidable antagonist at the Bar. But, really, when we are sitting in judgment in the exercise of a self-constituted jurisdiction, upon Homer and Sophocles, or Demosthenes and Tully, it is too much to expect that we should receive exactly, as the responses. of an oracle, the dicta of such a poet as the author of Greenfield Hill, or of such a writer as the biographer of Patrick Henry. We beg to be understood; we mean no personal disrespect to Mr. Wirt, nor would we cast a slur upon the memory of so respectable a person as Dr. Dwight, but we humbly conceive, that in giving up the authority of all the great men, without an exception, that Europe has ever produced, we have a right to expect that we shall not be required to defer very implicitly to the opinion of an individual or two of a new school, or even of ten times as many scores of individuals who-whatever may be their pretensions or their merits in other respects-cannot reasonably be supposed to be the best of all possible judges in such a case. For what W. Schlegel, whom Mr. Grimké has, to our infinite surprise, attempted to press into the service of his anti-classical “root and branch” reformation, says of the Antique in Sculpture, is true also of the remains of Greek eloquence and poetry; viz.-that there is but one voice throughout the whole of civilized Europe respecting its 'matchless excellence; and if ever it was called in question, it was when the taste of the moderns was fallen into a miserable state of mannerism and depravity. At least, if the merits of the latter have not been so universally and uniformly placed above all competition as those of the great masters in the plastic art, who have not even had a follower worthy of them but Canova, yet even in those branches of literature in which their modern rivals have sometimes been preferred to them, they have met with the fortune of Themistocles, and may seem fairly entitled to the first place, because each of their competitors, in his turn, concedes to them the second. For instance, Homer, in the