The universality of the study of the dead languages is objected to. “A young Englishman, unless he goes to the University of Cambridge, has scarcely a notion that there is any other kind of excellence.” But one would suppose that the practice of studying them by all enlightened nations, for so many centuries, ought to be conclusive evidence of their utility; because mankind are so much influenced by interest, that they are ever ready to abandon whatever does not promote it. Our opponents, however, tell us that they were engrafted into seminaries of learning in ages less enlightened than the present—that such is the force of prejudice and custom, they have been continued as a course of education despite their many disadvantages. Is this true? Have not mankind long since shaken off their idolatrous veneration for antiquity? The whole cumbrous and chaotic mass of feudal error has fallen before the full blaze of modern discoveries and improvements. But modern reformers and experimentalists, in removing the rubbish of ignorance, and the rust of antiquity from literary institutions, spared the languages in which Mæonides and Maro bequeathed to posterity models more potent for inspiring genius than all the waters of Castalia, in which Demosthenes and Cicero gave utterance to sentiments which, even at this distant day, have impelled many to deeds of noblest patriotism. Spared did we say? They have done more; they have recommended redoubled attention to them. It is a fact, that the learned languages are more extensively cultivated now than at any former period, and that too by utilitarian and practical Englishmen—by intellectual and acute Germans—by scientific Frenchmen—by economical, pence-counting Scotchmen, in the teeth of opponents, powerful, gifted, active. If they are worthy of so much attention in Europe, _a fortiori_, they are worthy of it here, for the obvious reason that, breathing as they do the spirit of liberty and republicanism, they furnish ideas more congenial and valuable to that form of government in which these principles are recognized, than to an oppressive one, where Brutus is stigmatized as a murderer, and the burning words of the two mighty scourges of tyranny regarded as dangerous food for popular lips. In a free country eloquence is the lever that heaves the body politic. In the Classics the purest models are found. Hence we infer that they are the appropriate study of American youth, and that it would be our highest glory to outstrip Europe in a knowledge of them, as we have already done in the science of government.