onclusion that our hairy ancestor carried in
his nature, also, a necessity for Greek.

And therefore, to say the truth, I cannot really think that humane
letters are in much actual danger of being thrust out from their leading
place in education, in spite of the array of authorities against them at
this moment. So long as human nature is what it is, their attractions
will remain irresistible. As with Greek, so with letters generally:
they will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more rationally, but
they will not lose their place. What will happen will rather be that
there will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too
many; there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and
false tendency; but letters will not in the end lose their leading
place. If they lose it for a time, they will get it back again. We shall
be brought back to them by our wants and aspirations. And a poor
humanist may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry, admit
the energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and
their present favor with the public, to be far greater than his own, and
still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on
behalf of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have
to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science,
and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can
conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane
letters; and so much the more, as they have the more and the greater
results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the
need in him for beauty.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: From "Discourses in America," 1885.]

[Footnote 21: From Ecclesiastes, viii. 17.]

[Footnote 22: From the "Iliad," xxiv. 49.]

HOW TO READ[23]

FREDERIC HARRISON

It is the fashion for those who have any connection with letters to
expatiate on the infinite blessings of literature, and the miraculous
achievements of the press: to extol, as a gift above price, the taste
for study and the love of reading. Far be it from me to gainsay the
inestimable value of good books, or to discourage any man from reading
the best; but I often think that we forget that other side to this
glorious view of literature--the misuse of books, the debilitating waste
of brain in aimless, promiscuous, vapid reading, or even, it may be, in
the poisonous inhalation of mere litera