Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[9] deficient in models, and destitute of the apparatus of critical study. It is certainly unfortunate that it is so, but there is the fact. The modern languages must be completely transformed, in structure, literary models, textbooks, and mode of teaching, before they can be used in education as we now use the Latin and Greek. I know of no institution in America in which it is even attempted thus to use them,--none where they are yet taught except as accomplishments. Nor is it apparent how they could be otherwise taught with the ordinary instrumentalities. A man may speak a dozen dialects as fluently as a European courier, and yet know as little as the courier knows of the principles of language. On the other hand, it is impossible for any boy to have faithfully learned the simplest manual of Latin or Greek grammar without having laid some foundation for systematic philology.

And as for the literary value of these languages, I will go still further, and with especial reference to that which there is most disposition to banish from use, the Greek. It certainly is not a hasty or boyish judgment on my part, nor yet one in which pedantry or servility can have much to do, when I deliberately avow the belief that the Greek literature is still so entirely unequalled among the accumulated memorials of the world, that it seems to differ from all others in kind rather than in degree. In writing this, I am thinking less of Plato than of Homer, and not more of Homer than of the dramatic and lyric poets. So far from the knowledge of other literatures tending to depreciate the Greek, it seems to me that no one can adequately value this who has not come back to it after long study of the others. Ampere, that master of French prose, has hardly overstated the truth when he says that the man best versed in all other books