In the United States we have never been kindly disposed towards extravagance of this order. During the years of our comparative poverty, when few citizens aspired to more than a competence, there was still money enough for Latin, and now and then for Greek. There was still a race of men with slender incomes and wide acquirements, to whom scholarship was a dearly bought but indestructible delight. Now that we have all the money there is, it is universally understood that Americans cannot afford to spend any of it on the study of “the best that has been known and thought in the world.” Against this practical decision no argument avails. Burke’s plea for the severity of the foundation upon which rest the principles of taste carries little weight, because our standard of taste is genial rather than severe. The influence of Latinity upon English literature concerns us even less, because prose and verse are emancipated from the splendid shackles they wore with such composure. But the mere reader, who is not an educational economist, asks himself now and then in what fashion Milton and Dryden would have written, if vocational training had supplanted the classics in their day. And to come nearer to our time, and closer to our modern and moderate appreciations, how would the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and the lines “On the Death of a Favourite Cat” have been composed, had Gray not spent all his life in the serene company of the Latins? It was easy to define the requirements of an educated man in the year 1738, when Gray, a bad mathematician and an admirable classicist, left Cambridge. It is uncommonly difficult to define them to-day. Dr. Goodnow, speaking a few years ago to the graduating class of Johns Hopkins University, summed up collegiate as well as professional education as the acquisition of the capacity to do work of a specific character. “Knowledge can come only as the result of experience. What is learned in any other way seldom has such reality as to make it an actual part of our lives.”