e in the ancient
masterpieces? And with what consistency could I, whose business lies so
much in the attempt to decipher the past, and to build up intelligible
forms out of the scattered fragments of long-extinct beings, fail to
take a sympathetic, though an unlearned, interest in the labours of a
Niebuhr, a Gibbon, or a Grote? Classical history is a great section of
the palaeontology of man; and I have the same double respect for it as
for other kinds of palaeontology--that is to say, a respect for the facts
which it establishes as for all facts, and a still greater respect for
it as a preparation for the discovery of a law of progress.

But if the classics were taught as they might be taught--if boys and
girls were instructed in Greek and Latin, not merely as languages, but
as illustrations of philological science; if a vivid picture of life on
the shores of the Mediterranean, two thousand years ago, were imprinted
on the minds of scholars; if ancient history were taught, not as a weary
series of feuds and fights, but traced to its causes in such men placed
under such conditions; if, lastly, the study of the classical books were
followed in such a manner as to impress boys with their beauties, and
with the grand simplicity of their statement of the everlasting problems
of human life, instead of with their verbal and grammatical
peculiarities; I still think it as little proper that they should form
the basis of a liberal education for our contemporaries, as I should
think it fitting to make that sort of palaeontology with which I am
familiar, the back-bone of modern education.

It is wonderful how close a parallel to classical training could be made
out of that palaeontology to which I refer. In the first place I could
get up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic in its terminology,
so altogether distasteful to the youthful mind, as to beat the recent
famous production of the head-masters out of the field in all these
excellences. Next, I could exercise my boys upon easy fossils, and bring
out all their powers of memory and all their ingenuity in the
application of my osteo-grammatical rules to the interpretation, or
construing, of those fragments. To those who had reached the higher
classes, I might supply odd bones to be built up into animals, giving
great honour and reward to him who succeeded in fabricating monsters
most entirely in accordance with the rules. That would answer to
verse-making and essay-writi