The classics will give a general training if they are made to do so. Literature will not impart a general training automatically. Art is a habit arising from a repetition of acts. The art of thinking is mastered by thinking, and the art of imagining by imagining, and that thinking and imagining will be done well if done under the guidance of masters. Has the literary art of Greece, which created Latin literature and directly and indirectly shaped the literature of all civilization, done its full work? Who can believe it? Every generation since Homer has been influenced by the art of Homer in translation and imitation, and no generations more so than those of Cowper and Morris and Lang in England and of Bryant and Palmer in America. The time may come when literary taste and literary art will be as well studied and demonstrated in modern languages as in those of Latin and Greek; the time may come when modern classics may be as well adapted for education as the classics of Greek and Rome which have been in the classroom for century upon century, but that time does not appear to be tomorrow or the day after. If the art of self-expression is the best test of education, if the art of self-expression is the most practical thing in life and the most permanent treasure that can be gained in school, then Greek literature, the finest masterpiece of self-expression, should remain, and Greek literature should be taught, as for centuries it was taught, with interpretation and translation furnished to the student, leaving the time of training to be devoted not to special sciences proper to the university, but to the general training in appreciation and expression, proper to academy and college. XIV THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD This title is not an advertisement for a patent medicine; it is the brief statement of an important historical fact. “Every schoolboy knows” that the revival of learning in Italy came from the vitalizing touch of Greek. Out of that renaissance, which the Jesuits took over and embodied in their system of teaching, grew modern scholarship in England through Linacre, Lilly, Colet and More, the forerunners of the Elizabethans. It was the beginning of modern scholarship in Germany, through Erasmus, the friend of these Englishmen, and through Melanchthon, whose name, like that of Erasmus, marks the power of Greek: out of that renaissance sprang the rejuvenated civilization of our day. Every schoolboy knows that Greek brought the modern world to life, but is it as well known or remembered that Greek has always been vivifying everything it touched?