"But," say the advocates of the present system, "it is good mental discipline."
When a boy has learned that in the genitive plural of the first declension of Greek nouns the final syllable is circumflexed, but to this there are the following exceptions: 1. That feminine adjectives and participles in [Greek: -os, -ê, -on] are accented like the genitive masculine, but other feminine adjectives and participles are perispomena in the genitive plural; 2. That the substantives _chrestes_, _aphue_, _etesiai_, and _chlounes_ in the genitive plural remain paroxytones, (Kühner's _Elementary Greek Grammar_, page 22,)--I say, when a boy has learned this and twenty other things just like it, his mind has not been one whit more disciplined than if he had learned the list of the old thirteen States, the number and names of the newly adopted ones, the times of their adoption, and the population, commerce, mineral and agricultural wealth of each. These, too, are merely exercises of memory, but they are exercises in what is of some interest and some use.
The particulars above cited are of so little use in understanding the Greek classics that I will venture to say that there are intelligent English scholars, who have never read anything but Bohn's translations, who have more genuine knowledge of the spirit of the Greek mind, and the peculiar idioms of the language, and more enthusiasm for it, than many a poor fellow who has stumbled blindly through the originals with the bayonet of the tutor at his heels, and his eyes and ears full of the Scotch snuff of the Greek Grammar.
What then? Shall we not learn these ancient tongues? By all means. "So many times as I learn a language, so many times I become a man," said Charles V.; and he said rightly. Latin and Greek are foully belied by the prejudices created by this technical, pedantic mode of teaching them, which makes one ragged, prickly bundle of all the dry facts of the language, and insists upon it that the boy shall not see one glimpse of its beauty, glory, or interest, till he has swallowed and digested the whole mass. Many die in this wilderness with their shoes worn out before reaching the Promised Land of Plato and the Tragedians.