eek poets was apparently a thorough one. It included the
teaching of language, grammar, metre, style, and subject matter, and
was aided by reading aloud, which was reckoned of great importance,
and learning by heart, on the part of the pupils. In the discussion
of the subject matter any amount of comment was freely allowed to
the master, who indeed was expected to have at his fingers' ends
explanations of all sorts of allusions, and thus to enable the boys to
pick up a great deal of odd knowledge and a certain amount of history,
mixed up of course with a large percentage of valueless mythology.
"In grammaticis," says Cicero, "poetarum pertractatio, historiarum
cognitio, verborum interpretatio, pronuntiandi quidam sonus."[288] The
method, if such it can be called, was not at all unlike that pursued
in our own public schools, Eton, for example, before new methods and
subjects came in. Its great defect in each case was that it gave but
little opportunity for learning to distinguish fact from fancy,
or acquiring that scientific habit of mind which is now becoming
essential for success in all departments of life, and which at Rome
was so rare that it seems audacious to claim it even for such a man of
action as Caesar, or for such a man of letters as Varro. In England
this defect was compensated to some extent by the manly tone of school
life, but at Rome that side of school education was wanting, and the
result was a want of solidity both intellectual and moral.

The one saving feature, given a really good and high-minded teacher,
might be the appeal to the example of the great and good men of the
past, both Greek and Roman, and the study of their motives in action,
in good fortune and ill. This is the kind of teaching which we find
illustrated in the book of Valerius Maximus, which has already been
alluded to, who takes some special virtue or fine quality as the
subject of most of his chapters,[289]--fortitudo, patientia,
abstinentia, moderatio, pietas erga parentes, amicitia, and so on,
and illustrates them by examples and stories drawn mainly from Roman
history, partly also from Greek. This kind of appeal to the young mind
was undoubtedly good, and the finest product of the method is the
immortal work of Plutarch, the Lives of the great men of Greece and
Rome, drawn up for ethical rather than historical purposes. But here
again we must note a serious drawback. Any one who turns over the
pages of Valerius will see that the