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I remember he picked up the book I had brought off that morning to read in the train the second volume of Hazlitt's Essays, the last of my English classics and discoursed so wisely about books that I wished I had spent more time in his company at Biggleswick. 'Hazlitt was the academic Radical of his day, he said.
Professedly indeed, they are aiming at the Greek and Roman classics, but their criticisms have quite as great force against all literature as against any. I think I shall be best able to bring out what I have to say on the subject by examining the statements which they make in defence of their own view of it.
A long speech ensued about dear mothers, amiable daughters, classics, languages, and foreign tours. That was all the account Mr. Kendal could give his wife of the dialogue, and she could only infer that Algernon's harangue had sent him into such a fit of abstraction, that he really could not tell the drift of it.
All that is great he instinctively apprehends, because it is akin to himself. And only so can anything be truly apprehended. For every man and every class can only understand and practise the virtues appropriate to their occupations. A professor will never be a hero, however much he reads the classics. A shop-walker will never be a poet, however much he reads poetry.
I shall respect their memory. There's a box of flowers in your room, Anne. They came about an hour ago." After the first week the girls of Patty's Place settled down to a steady grind of study; for this was their last year at Redmond and graduation honors must be fought for persistently. Anne devoted herself to English, Priscilla pored over classics, and Philippa pounded away at Mathematics.
But what I say now, as I said at the beginning, is that Latin and Greek are dead languages. For us, for the future, for the competitions of the modern industrial and social era, the classics are no good. For a few ornamental persons a knowledge of them may be a pleasing accomplishment. But they are luxuries, not necessaries. They belong to a bygone age.
It was like keeping a boy's spirit and imagination in prison, instead of allowing them free communion with the world around. Farther, I was angry at boys having been put over me, for their knowledge of classics, who were perfectly ignorant of the higher branches of knowledge at which I had been working. "Clever but idle" was usually the character I got at school.
In virtue of the grandeur of zeal which inspires them, these pages, which are in substance nothing more than the now familiar omniscient examiner's programme, retain a place as one of our classics.
It was a land where every child went to school, where almost every individual inhabitant could read and write, where even the middle classes were proficients in mathematics and the classics, and could speak two or more modern languages; where the whole nation, with but few exceptions, were producers of material or intellectual wealth, and where comparatively little of unproductive consumption prevailed.
Atop of the bookcase in Captain Link's study the bookcase, by the way, contains Burton's Thousand and One Nights, the Discourses of Epictetus, and President Eliot's tabloid classics is the skull in question, surmounted by a Moro fez. Across the front of the fez is printed this significant legend: THIS IS JOHN HENRY JOHN HENRY DISOBEYED CAPTAIN LINK Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
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