In the field of art we admit that he who would be great must study the great models, and be directed by competent masters. Even a Raphael owes something of his high renown to the patient diligence with which he studied the best pieces of his master Pietro Vanucci, the most noted artist of his day. So he who aspires to become a master in the expression of thought will wisely seek the masterpieces of those who have embalmed great thought in the most finished and excellent language. That the writers of Greece are preëminently the writers who have done this as profound and widely read a linguist as Max Müller testifies. He says: “What the inhabitants of the small city of Athens achieved in philosophy, in poetry, in art, in science, in politics, is known to all of us; and our admiration for them increases tenfold if, by a study of other literatures, such as the literatures of India, Persia, and China, we are enabled to compare their achievements with those of other nations of antiquity. The rudiments of almost everything, with the exception of religion, we, the people of Europe, the heirs to a fortune accumulated during twenty or thirty centuries of intellectual toil, owe to the Greeks; and strange as it may sound, but few, I think would gainsay it, that to the present day the achievements of these, our distant ancestors and earliest masters, the songs of Homer, the dialogues of Plato, the speeches of Demosthenes, and the statues of Phidias, stand, if not unrivalled, at least unsurpassed by anything that has been achieved by their descendants and pupils. Like their own goddess, Athene, the people of Athens seem to spring full armed into the arena of history; and we look in vain to Egypt, Syria, or India for more than a few of the seeds that burst into such marvellous growth on the soil of Attica.” He belittles human nature who thinks the practical value of commercial arithmetic to be greater than such a mastery of language as shall enable one to express himself correctly in his own tongue. To study an instrument for the expression of thought, so wonderfully flexible, so admirably exact, so widely comprehensive, so astonishingly strong, is to the student of his native tongue what training in a great international exposition of machinery, like that exhibited in Philadelphia in our centennial year, would be to a bright young mechanic, a schooling of incalculable worth. What an insight it gives into the subtle changes in the forms of words; what a comprehension of the root meanings of words, what an idea of the power of arrangement in words, what a conception of the music and beauty in the sounds of words.