om the steps of an omnibus, where he was getting a
surreptitious ride. "Poor boy! let him stay. Who knows his trials?
Perhaps he studies Latin."

The witty Heinrich Heine says, in bitter remembrance of his early
sufferings,--"The Romans would never have conquered the world, if they
had had to learn their own language. They had leisure, because they were
born with the knowledge of what nouns form their accusatives in _im_."

Now we are not among those who decry the Greek and Latin classics. We
think it a glorious privilege to read both those grand old tongues, and
that an intelligent, cultivated man who is shut out from the converse of
the splendid minds of those olden times loses a part of his birthright;
and therefore it is that we mourn that but one dry, hard, technical
path, one sharp, straight, narrow way, is allowed into so goodly a land
of knowledge. We think there is no need that the study of Greek and
Latin should be made such a horror. There is many a man without a verbal
memory, who could neither recite in order the paradigms of the Greek
verbs, nor repeat the lists of nouns that form their accusative in one
termination or another, who, nevertheless, by the exercise of his
faculties of comparison and reasoning, could learn to read the Greek and
Latin classics so as to take their sense and enjoy their spirit; and
that is all that they are worth caring for. We have known one young
scholar, who could not by any possibility repeat the lists of exceptions
to the rules in the Latin Grammar, who yet delightedly filled his
private note-book with quotations from the "AEneid," and was making
extracts of literary gems from his Greek Reader, at the same time that
he was every day "screwed" by his tutor upon some technical point of the
language.

Is there not many a master of English, many a writer and orator, who
could not repeat from memory the list of nouns ending in _y_ that form
their plural in _ies_, with the exceptions under it? How many of us
could do this? Would it help a good writer and fluent speaker to know
the whole of Murray's Grammar by heart, or does real knowledge of a
language ever come in this way?

At present the rich stores of ancient literature are kept like the
savory stew which poor Dominie Sampson heard simmering in the witch's
kettle. One may have much appetite, but there is but one way of getting
it. The Meg Merrilies of our educational system, with her harsh voice,
and her "Gape, sinner, and