To these considerations we may add one more characteristic of the classical literatures, as instruments in the class-room, and we shall have seen enough on our present topic, to understand the theory which underlies the _Ratio Studiorum_. These tongues are dead. They are not the language of common life. They are not picked up by instinct, and without reflection. Everything has to be learned by system, rule, and formula. The relations of grammar and logic must be attended to with deliberation. Thought and judgment are constantly exercised in assigning the exact equivalents of the mother tongue for every phrase of the original. The coincidence of construction is too little, the community of idiomatic thought too remote, for the boy's mind to catch at the idea, by force of that preëstablished harmony which exists among most modern tongues. Only the law of thought and logic guides him, with the assistance of a teacher to lead the way, and reassure his struggling conception. And when, in the last instance, the boy comes to write and to speak the language so learned, and quickens it, though dead, with the very life of actual speech which makes modern languages live, we have the supreme test and proof of successful toil, that which consists in the power to reproduce. We have also the very specific advantage, in this case, that the toil has been of the most valuable kind; it has been personal labor, spent in the freshness of life on complete self-culture. For that great law of all success in life, personal labor, has been honored in the most remunerative way, by cultivating memory, exercising judgment, and acquiring in the same thoughtful, reflective manner two languages together, Latin and the mother tongue, Greek and the mother tongue, each systematically helping the others by analogy and contrast. And, withal, what is more congenial to the young than letters, language, talk?