waiters; and, even if we had, Romaic, or modern Greek, is much
more easily learned than the old classical tongue. The reason of this
comparative ease will be plain to any one who, retaining a vague memory
of his Greek grammar, takes up a modern Greek newspaper. He will find
that the idioms of the modern newspaper are the idioms of all newspapers,
that the grammar is the grammar of modern languages, that the opinions
are expressed in barbarous translations of barbarous French and English
journalistic _cliches_ or commonplaces. This ugly and undignified
mixture of the ancient Greek characters, and of ancient Greek words with
modern grammar and idioms, and stereotyped phrases, is extremely
distasteful to the scholar. Modern Greek, as it is at present printed,
is not the natural spoken language of the peasants. You can read a Greek
leading article, though you can hardly make sense of a Greek rural
ballad. The peasant speech is a thing of slow development; there is a
basis of ancient Greek in it, with large elements of Slavonic, Turkish,
Italian, and other imposed or imported languages. Modern literary Greek
is a hybrid of revived classical words, blended with the idioms of the
speeches which have arisen since the fall of the Roman Empire. Thus,
thanks to the modern and familiar element in it, modern Greek "as she is
writ" is much more easily learned than ancient Greek. Consequently, if
any one has need for the speech in business or travel, he can acquire as
much of it as most of us have of French, with considerable ease. People
therefore argue that ancient Greek is particularly superfluous in
schools. Why waste time on it, they ask, which could be expended on
science, on modern languages, or any other branch of education? There is
a great deal of justice in this position. The generation of men who are
now middle-aged bestowed much time and labour on Greek; and in what, it
may be asked, are they better for it? Very few of them "keep up their
Greek." Say, for example, that one was in a form with fifty boys who
began the study--it is odds against five of the survivors still reading
Greek books. The worldly advantages of the study are slight: it may lead
three of the fifty to a good degree, and one to a fellowship; but good
degrees may be taken in other subjects, and fellowships may be abolished,
or "nationalised," with all other forms of property.

Then, why maintain Greek in schools? Only a very minute percent