The teaching of the classics has been and is now justified by the general training they impart, but it is chiefly when taught as literature that they impart that general training. If the classics are subordinated to the university lecturer’s specialty, then the classics are imparting little general training and have hardly more right in the classroom, except for indirect results which may accrue from contact with art, than have special courses in conchology or entomology. Let the teacher look upon the classics as art to be reproduced after being appreciated, and a general training will be the outcome. Composition should be made the aim of literature. Idioms of languages, and their vocabulary and their structure differ, but thought and imagination may be the same. Set all the languages of the world before a moving-picture, and each language will tell the common story on the screen to its children in its own way of speaking. So the student of any language may learn from Homer how to select details and group them into artistic wholes, how to carry on the narrative through significant and choice events, how to dwell on the important and touch lightly on the insignificant, how to relieve a story and intensify a part of it by appropriate comparisons. As the student learns how to tell a story, so too may he master the art of describing a scene, of creating a character, of making a speech. He will be taught the way to focus an idea and give it discriminating expression by the right word, the way to embody good or evil in concrete and picturesque words and the way to be proficient in all the elements and processes of composition. The Greek Homer made the Latin Æneid, the Greek Theocritus made the Latin Eclogue and, if Stedman is right, also the Tennysonian Idyll. The literary art of Greek and Latin has given and will give artistic form to the student’s vernacular.