If the question at issue were, whether we were to give up those advantages, of to give up the present system of classical education, the decision might be attended with some difficulty. But, fortunately, that is not the alternative. The system need not be absolutely abandoned in order to remove the solid objections to it, and to secure all its advantages. It only requires to be modified and rendered more conformable with the present state of society, the extension of human knowledge, and the wants of the students. It is merely proposed to circumscribe that study to the all-important capacity to read those languages with facility and correctness—in a word, to prune off, as worthless for the present purposes of society, those portions of the study which appear to demand a capacity to speak and write them—a capacity which is never required, and never employed, by above one man in five thousand of the inhabitants of the British dominions and of this country. The case is different with some of the inhabitants of the Continent of Europe. “But that is none of our concern.” The major part, perhaps I might say nearly the whole, of the heroic deeds, which shed such a glorious lustre on the Grecian and Roman histories, are most judiciously collected in the “_Selectæ e profanis_,” one of the best books ever produced by human industry, compiled with nice tact and discrimination. They are accompanied by applications and moral reflections calculated to make a deep and lasting impression on the minds of the young. I think I risque but little in stating an opinion, that thus concentrated and enforced, they are likely to produce more powerful and lasting effects than when scattered through the original histories, where a large portion of them never meets the eye of a student. It is greatly to be regretted that this admirable book, calculated as it is to produce the most salutary consequences on society, has through the prurient desire of novelty, been injudiciously excluded from many schools, and has given way to substitutes incomparably inferior. The fourth advantage is impressing on the minds of youth the splendid moral maxims to be found in the Latin poets. No man can have a higher opinion of the excellence of those effusions than I have. But though I believe their intrinsic value cannot easily be overrated, yet, I am persuaded, their amount is. Horace has more of those than any other Latin author—yet in a judicious selection of the ethics of this poet and others, it appears that he has only three hundred and seventeen lines of that character, a great part of which, and of those of other Latin poets, are introduced into the Latin primer to illustrate the rules of the grammar.