"The suggestion of the course of English at Randolph-Macon College sprang from the study of the ancient languages. The feeling existed that it was impossible to expect appreciation of idioms in a foreign language when students knew nothing about those in their own tongue. To quote from Professor Price's own words at the time: 'It was irrational, absurd, almost criminal, for example, to expect a young man, whose knowledge of English words and constructions was scant and inexact, to put into English a difficult thought of Plato or an involved period of Cicero.' The course pursued in consequence was entirely original in its premises, and endeavored to meet these difficulties. Both the disease and remedy were brought out by the conditions present; and to this, I think, may be ascribed, in large measure, the success of the movement and its value as a stimulus. The end set was to place, in the ordinary college course, the study of English on an equal footing with that of Latin or Greek, giving it the same time and attention, aiming at the same thoroughness, and enforcing the same strictness of method. A knowledge of the early forms of English was demanded, not as philology pure and simple, constituting an end in itself, but as a means for acquiring a true, appreciative knowledge of the mother tongue, and thereby for understanding its literature and other literatures all the more. It now seems almost incredible that it required so great an effort at the time to take this step or that old traditions could become so firmly crystallized. "Professor Price's efforts succeeded all the more easily in that they were seconded by his presiding officer, the Rev. Dr. James A. Duncan, a man of singular breadth and sympathy of mind, who had grouped about him, irrespective of church and denominational ties, a band of worthy associates. Price, as Professor of Greek and Latin, gave up the latter to his colleague, James A. Harrison, who had charge of the modern languages, and taking control of the English, developed it side by side with his Greek, so as to cover a course through four continuous years. This was the result of the work of two sessions, 1868-'70. The movement soon spread far and wide. Other institutions, impelled by the same needs, either imitated it outright--some of them actually going so far as always to unite the English department with the Greek, as if there were some subtle virtue in the connection (building possibly even wiser than they knew)--or developed out of their own necessities similar arrangements.