We see from this how the Renascence ideal had the extraordinary effect of banishing literature from the school-room. Literature has indeed not ceased to influence the young; it still counts for much more in their lives than in the lives of their seniors; but we all know who are the writers who affected our own minds in childhood and youth, and who affect the minds of our pupils now—not Eutropius or Xenophon, or Cæsar or Cicero, but Defoe and Swift and Marryatt and Walter Scott. The ancient writings which were literature to Melancthon and Erasmus, as they are still to many in our universities and elsewhere, can never be literature to the young. Most of the classical authors read in the schoolroom could not be made literature to young people even by means of translations, for they were men who wrote for men and women only. We see that it would be absurd to make an ordinary boy of twelve or fourteen study Burke or Pope. And if we do not make him read Burke, whose language he understands, why do we make him read Cicero whose language he does not understand? If he cannot appreciate Pope, why do we teach him Horace? The Renascence gives us the explanation of this singular anomaly. The scholars of that age were so delighted with the “composite harmony” of the ancient classics that the study of these classics seemed to them the one thing worth living for. The main, if not the only object they kept in view in bringing up the young was to gain for them admission to the treasure house; and though young people could not understand the ancient writings as literature, they might at least study them as language and thus be ready to enjoy them as literature in after-life. Thus the subject of instruction in the schoolroom came to be, not the classics but, the classical languages. The classics were used as school books, but the only meaning thought of was the meaning of the detached word or at best of the detached sentence. You ask a child learning to read if he understands what he is reading about, and he says, “I can’t think of the meaning because I am thinking of the words.” The same thing happened in the schoolboy’s study of the classics, and so it has come to pass that to this day the great writers of antiquity discharge a humble function which they certainly never contemplated. “Great Cæsar’s body dead and turned to clay May stop a hole to keep the wind away.” And great Cæsar’s mind has been turned to uses almost as paltry. He has in fact written for the schoolroom not a commentary on the Wars of Gaul—nothing of the kind—but simply a book of exercises in Latin construing; and an excellent book it would be if he had only graduated the difficulties better. § 16. IV. There is yet another weakness about the Renascence ideal—a weakness from which most ideals are free.