in old times consecrated to the classics, as they are familiarly described, but had taken the lion's share of the domain. That there was good reason for some change every one must admit, nor can it be denied that the ancient and long-continued monopoly of Greek and Latin in the higher education had become, in a measure certainly, an anachronism. But it seems as if the pendulum had now swung too far in the new direction.

Men cannot live by bread alone nor, in the highest sense, can education be restricted to methods of money getting or be of the finest quality and temper if the

humanities," as they used to be pleasantly called, are wholly thrust aside and neglected. It was not by accident that the literature and learning of Rome and Greece bore uncontested sway for centuries in all the universities, old and new, of Western civilization. Consider for a moment the facts upon which the classical education so long rested in unquestioned supremacy. There was a strong and brilliant movement

as early as the twelfth century to scatter the darkness which had settled down upon Europe after the downfall of the Roman Empire and in which men had been groping about for eight hundred years. This movement did not then culminate, but it opened the way for what has ever since been known as the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the point at which modern history is said to begin. That period is not inaptly named a rebirth, for men felt indeed as if they had been born again when they drew up from the darkness and released from the prison of the palimpsests the manuscripts which brought them face to face with the history, the art, the literature, the thought and the civilization of Greece and Rome. But there was much more than this. That was the time when the human mind suddenly broke forth into light and freedom. Men began to question everything and knowledge started on a new career. They sought to establish the place of the earth in the universe and set out to discover the size, the shape and the motion

of the planet upon which they lived. The doors of science were flung open and inquiry entered in. The material conditions of life were once more considered after long neglect. The drainage, the water supply, the baths of ancient Rome began to suggest that it was, perhaps, unwise to discard them, as Greek art had been discarded, merely because they were the work of pagans, and the idea dawned that plagueridden cities and filthy habits were not essential to eternal well-being, and that the salvation of the soul was not incompatible with wholesome bodies and with public health.

All these things and many others were but outward manifestations of the liberation of the human intellect which made that era forever memorable, and which was felt in a thousand ways. The world identified this liberation of the mind with the revival of learning, as it was called, which was in effect the discovery and rehabilitation of Greek and Roman literature and art. How far this bringing the classics again to

light, accompanied by the resurrection of long-buried statues, was the cause of the great intellectual movement of the Renaissance, and how far it was merely one result of the movement itself, we need not now inquire. That the revival of the classics. was coincident with the Renaissance and had an enormous influence upon the thought of the time is beyond doubt. To classical learning, therefore, men felt themselves so deeply indebted that it took possession of all the seats of the higher education and was in fact the higher education itself. The classical writers became the touchstone by which men were tested not only intellectually but socially. The education of a gentleman meant that a man had at least been brought into the presence of the classics, even if he remembered nothing of the pages which had passed before his eyes. A man ignorant of the

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humanities," the litera humaniores, no matter what his other accomplishments, was considered hopelessly uneducated. The classics in fact became a fetish which led to

many absurdities among their devotees, like that which has required successive generations of English boys to write Latin verses. The verses thus composed in metres painfully acquired and quickly forgotten could never be otherwise than more or less bad, and the exercise was of no more value than teaching them to manufacture poems in Choctaw would have been. Whereas, if they had been taught by ear to speak Latin, even in the medieval form, it would have been of value always and everywhere.

But in getting rid of absurdities let us beware of losing the substance. It is not well wholly to forget the vast debt which mankind owes to the recovery of the literature and art of Greece and Rome. It was by no means without reason that a classical was known and is still known as a liberal education. The mind of the Renaissance was liberalized by the study of the classics and what was true then is true now, for the classical education liberalizes in the only right way by making its beneficiaries re