The most Homeric of modern
men could not read Homer. As for Keats, he was born a Greek, it has been
said; but had he been born with a knowledge of Greek, he never, probably,
would have been guilty of his chief literary faults. This is not
certain, for some modern men of letters deeply read in Greek have all the
qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised. Greek
will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is certain; but it
may, at least, help to restrain effusive and rhetorical gabble. Our
Asiatic rhetoricians might perhaps be even more barbarous than they are
if Greek were a sealed book to them. However this may be, it is, at
least, well to find out in a school what boys are worth instructing in
the Greek language. Now, of their worthiness, of their chances of
success in the study, Homer seems the best touchstone; and he is
certainly the most attractive guide to the study.

At present boys are introduced to the language of the Muses by
pedantically written grammars, full of the queerest and most arid
metaphysical and philological verbiage. The very English in which these
deplorable books are composed may be scientific, may be comprehensible by
and useful to philologists, but is utterly heart-breaking to boys.

Philology might be made fascinating; the history of a word, and of the
processes by which its different forms, in different senses, were
developed, might be made as interesting as any other story of events. But
grammar is not taught thus: boys are introduced to a jargon about matters
meaningless, and they are naturally as much enchanted as if they were
listening to a _chimaera bombinans in vacuo_. The grammar, to them, is a
mere buzz in a chaos of nonsense. They have to learn the buzz by rote;
and a pleasant process that is--a seductive initiation into the
mysteries. When they struggle so far as to be allowed to try to read a
piece of Greek prose, they are only like the Marchioness in her
experience of beer: she once had a sip of it. Ten lines of Xenophon,
narrating how he marched so many parasangs and took breakfast, do not
amount to more than a very unrefreshing sip of Greek. Nobody even tells
the boys who Xenophon was, what he did there, and what it was all about.
Nobody gives a brief and interesting sketch of the great march, of its
history and objects. The boys straggle along with Xenophon, knowing not
whence or whither:

"They stray through a desolate re