[Footnote 1917: Notwithstanding recent censures of classical studies as a useless waste of time, there can be no doubt that they give the highest finish to intellectual culture. The ancient classics contain the most consummate models of literary art; and the greatest writers have been their most diligent students. Classical culture was the instrument with which Erasmus and the Reformers purified Europe. It distinguished the great patriots of the seventeenth century; and it has ever since characterised our greatest statesmen. "I know not how it is," says an English writer, "but their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those who constantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect upon their judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general. They are like persons who have had a weighty and impressive experience; they are more truly than others under the empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among those with whom they live."] [Footnote 1918: Hazlitt's TABLE TALK: 'On Thought and Action.'] [Footnote 201: Mungo Park declared that he was more affected by this incident than by any other that befel him in the course of his travels. As he lay down to sleep on the mat spread for him on the floor of the hut, his benefactress called to the female part of the family to resume their task of spinning cotton, in which they continued employed far into the night. "They lightened their labour with songs," says the traveller, "one of which was composed extempore, for I was myself the subject of it; it was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in a chorus. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words, literally translated, were these: 'The winds roared, and the rains fell. The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk, no wife to grind his corn.' Chorus--'Let us pity the white man, no mother has he!' Trifling as this recital may appear, to a person in my situation the circumstance was affecting in the highest degree. I was so oppressed by such unexpected kindness, that sleep fled before my eyes."] [Footnote 202: 'Transformation, or Monte Beni.'] [Footnote 203: 'Portraits Contemporains,' iii. 519.]