Then it was our turn to ask the master why he had done that. “Well, boys,” said he, “I expected it all along. You see it now. How many times you have wondered at my keeping you so long on perhaps only three or four lines a whole afternoon! Now you understand. We have not read Virgil, but we have studied Latin poetry, and you have learned it. In future we shall skim the poets here and there, as I may choose, and at the final exhibition you shall be ready to read to the auditorium any part of the Greek and Latin authors the audience may think fit to call for.” And so we did, and did it well. Once, being on a school committee, we asked the master of the high-school――and a learned man he was――why he hurried through so many lines. “I cannot help it,” said he; “they must have read so many lines [_sic_] when they present themselves for examination at Harvard”! Nor shall we omit here to note that young men have failed in their examinations to enter Harvard because, in sooth, they could not get through _the recitation_. Prof. Agassiz himself told us that one of his favorite students (whom we knew well) failed because he could not repeat _verbatim_ a certain portion of a treatise on some point of natural philosophy. However, the good professor insisted on the youth being examined as to the sense, and not, parrot-like, repeating sentence after sentence, and the candidate carried the palm. This “recitation” system, the “forty lines” routine, is a curse. We are sure professors will bear us out in our assertion. Dr. Becker, in his excellent article in the _American Catholic Quarterly_, deals with this matter in a very luminous style. What use, then, of so many authors, or of the whole of any one of them, for a text-book? _Non multa sed multum, and multum in parvo._ The bee does not draw all that is garnered in the chalice, but just that much which is necessary to make the honey. No wonder that so few are endowed with the _nescio quo sapore vernaculo_, as Cicero would call it. We have treasured for the last three-and-forty years the paper on which we copied the description of the war-horse, as rendered by our professor of rhetoric, who gave two lectures on it, bringing in and commenting on parallel descriptions in prose and verse. Nearly half a century has passed away, and those two charming afternoons in that old class-room are yet fresh in our remembrance.