"See what is implied in
having read Homer intelligently through, or Thucydides or Demosthenes;
what light will have been shed on the essence and laws of human
existence, on political society, on the relations of man to man, on
human nature itself." There are various conceivable ways of
counter-arguing these assertions, but the shortest is to call for the
facts--the results upon the many thousands that have passed through
their ten years of classical drill. Professor Campbell of St. Andrews,
once remarked, with reference to the value of Greek in particular, that
the question would have to be ultimately decided by the inner
consciousness of those that have undergone the study. To this we are
entitled to add, their powers as manifested to the world, of which
powers spectators can be the judges. When, with a few brilliant
exceptions, we discover nothing at all remarkable in the men that have
been subjected to the classical training, we may consider it as almost
a waste of time to analyse the grandiloquent assertions of Mr. Bonamy
Price. But if we were to analyse them, we should find that _boys_ never
read Caesar and Tacitus through in succession; still less Thucydides
Demosthenes, and Aristotle; that very few _men_ read and understand
these writers; that the shortest way to come into contact with Aristotle
is to avoid his Greek altogether, and take his expositors and
translators in the modern languages.
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