his scholarship cannot have been quite so thorough as I represented
it. You convey, moreover, though with perfect modesty in form, the idea
that you believe your own Latin superior to your grandfather's,
notwithstanding the far greater variety of your studies. Let me confess
that I _did_ somewhat idealize that description of your grandfather's
intellectual life. I described rather a life which might have been than
a life which actually was. And even this "might have been" is
problematical. It may be doubted whether any modern has ever really
mastered Latin. The most that can be said is that a man situated like
your grandfather, without a profession, without our present temptation
to scatter effort in many pursuits, and who made Latin scholarship his
unique intellectual purpose, would probably go nearer to a satisfactory
degree of attainment than we whose time and strength have been divided
into so many fragments. But the picture of a perfect modern Latinist is
purely ideal, and the prevalent notion of high attainment in a dead
language is not fixed enough to be a standard, whilst if it were fixed
it would certainly be a very low standard. The scholars of this century
do not write Latin except as a mere exercise; they do not write books in
Latin, and they never speak it at all. They do not use the language
actively; they only read it, which is not really using it, but only
seeing how other men have used it. There is the same difference between
reading a language and writing or speaking it that there is between
looking at pictures intelligently and painting them. The scholars of the
sixteenth century spoke Latin habitually, and wrote it with ease and
fluency. "Nicholas Grouchy," says Montaigne, "who wrote a book _de
Comitiis Romanorum_; William Guerente, who has written a commentary upon
Aristotle; George Buchanan, that great Scotch poet; and Marc Anthony
Muret, whom both France and Italy have acknowledged for the best orator
of his time, my domestic tutors (at college), have all of them often
told me that I had in my infancy that language so very fluent and ready
that they were afraid to enter into discourse with me." This passage is
interesting for two reasons; it shows that the scholars of that age
spoke Latin; but it proves at the same time that they cannot have been
really masters of the language, since they were "afraid to enter into
discourse" with a clever child. Fancy an Englishman who professed to be
a French sch