Did time permit, I might quote you a chorus of Aeschylus, a passage from Thucydides or from Aristotle, to illustrate Gibbon's saying that the Greek language 'gave a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of metaphysics.' But there it is, and it has haunted our literature; at first filtering through Latin, at length breaking from Constantinople in flood and led to us, to Oxford and Cambridge, by Erasmus, by Grocyn: Thee, that lord of splendid lore Orient from old Hellas' shore. To have a sense of Greek, too, is to own a corrective of taste. I quote another old schoolmaster here--a dead friend, Sidney Irwin: What the Greeks disliked was extravagance, caprice, boastfulness, and display of all kinds.... The Greeks _hated_ all monsters. The quaint phrase in the "Odyssey" about the Queen of the Laestrygones--'She was tall as a mountain, and they hated her'--would have seemed to them most reasonable.... To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue of pruning--of condensing--a perpetual protest against all that crowds, and swells, and weakens the writer's purpose. To forget this is but to 'confound our skill in covetousness.' We cannot all be writers ... but we all wish to have good taste, and good taste is born of a generous caution about letting oneself go. I say _generous,_ for caution is seldom generous--but it is a generous mood which is in no haste to assert itself. To consider the thing, the time, the place, the person, and to take yourself and your own feelings _only fifth_ is to be armour-proof against bad taste. VIII They tell us that Greek is going, here. Well, I hold no brief for compulsory Greek; and I shall say but one word on it. I put it, rather idly, to a vote in a Cambridge Combination Room, the other day, and was amazed to find how the votes were divided. The men of science were by no means unanimous. They owned that there was much to be said even for compulsory Greek, if only Greek had been intelligently taught. And with that, of course, I agree: for to learn Greek is, after all, a baptism into a noble cult. The Romans knew _that._ I believe that, even yet, if the schools would rebuild their instruction in Greek so as to make it interesting, as it ought to be, from the first, we should oust those birds who croak and chatter upon the walls of our old Universities. I find the following in FitzGerald's "Polonius": An old ruinous tower which had harboured innumerable jackdaws, sparrows, and bats, was at length repaired. When the masons left it, the jackdaws, sparrows, and bats came back in search of their old dwellings. But these were all filled up. 'Of what use now is this great building?' said they, 'come let us forsake this useless stone-heap: And the beauty of this little apologue is that you can read it either way. IX