“But I can’t learn Latin and Greek,” says young Scholasticus. “I can’t remember all those rules and exceptions. I’ve tried, and I can’t. If you could only know how my head feels when I try! And I won’t be at the foot of the class all the time, if I have to get my living by digging.” Suppose, now, the boy is pushed on at the point of the bayonet to a kind of knowledge in which he has no interest, communicated in a way that requires faculties which Nature has not given him,--what occurs? He goes through his course, either shamming, _shirking_, _ponying_, all the while consciously discredited and dishonored,--or else, putting forth an effort that is a draft on all his nervous energy, he makes merely a decent scholar, and loses his health for life. Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education,--if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result,--if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon,--all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness. “But,” say the advocates of the present system, “it is good mental discipline.” I doubt it. It is mere waste of time. When a boy has learned that in the genitive plural of the first declension of Greek nouns the final syllable is circumflexed, but to this there are the following exceptions: 1. That feminine adjectives and participles in-ος,-η,-ον are accented like the genitive masculine, but other feminine adjectives and participles are perispomena in the genitive plural; 2. That the substantives _chrestes_, _aphue_, _etesiai_, and _chlounes_ in the genitive plural remain paroxytones, (Kühner’s _Elementary Greek Grammar_, page 22,)--I say, when a boy has learned this and twenty other things just like it, his mind has not been one whit more disciplined than if he had learned the list of the old thirteen States, the number and names of the newly adopted ones, the times of their adoption, and the population, commerce, mineral and agricultural wealth of each. These, too, are merely exercises of memory, but they are exercises in what is of some interest and some use. The particulars above cited are of so little use in understanding the Greek classics that I will venture to say that there are intelligent English scholars, who have never read anything but Bohn’s translations, who have more genuine knowledge of the spirit of the Greek mind, and the peculiar idioms of the language, and more enthusiasm for it, than many a poor fellow who has stumbled blindly through the originals with the bayonet of the tutor at his heels, and his eyes and ears full of the Scotch snuff of the Greek Grammar.