ere--a dead friend, Sidney Irwin:

What the Greeks disliked was extravagance, caprice,
boastfulness, and display of all kinds.... The Greeks _hated_ all
monsters. The quaint phrase in the "Odyssey" about the Queen
of the Laestrygones--'She was tall as a mountain, and they
hated her'--would have seemed to them most reasonable....
To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue
of pruning--of condensing--a perpetual protest against all
that crowds, and swells, and weakens the writer's purpose.
To forget this is but to 'confound our skill in covetousness.'
We cannot all be writers ... but we all wish to have good
taste, and good taste is born of a generous caution about
letting oneself go. I say _generous,_ for caution is seldom
generous--but it is a generous mood which is in no haste to
assert itself. To consider the thing, the time, the place, the
person, and to take yourself and your own feelings _only fifth_
is to be armour-proof against bad taste.

VIII

They tell us that Greek is going, here. Well, I hold no brief for
compulsory Greek; and I shall say but one word on it. I put it,
rather idly, to a vote in a Cambridge Combination Room, the other
day, and was amazed to find how the votes were divided. The men
of science were by no means unanimous. They owned that there was
much to be said even for compulsory Greek, if only Greek had been
intelligently taught. And with that, of course, I agree: for to
learn Greek is, after all, a baptism into a noble cult. The
Romans knew _that._ I believe that, even yet, if the schools
would rebuild their instruction in Greek so as to make it
interesting, as it ought to be, from the first, we should oust
those birds who croak and chatter upon the walls of our old
Universities. I find the following in FitzGerald's "Polonius":

An old ruinous tower which had harboured innumerable
jackdaws, sparrows, and bats, was at length repaired. When
the masons left it, the jackdaws, sparrows, and bats came back
in search of their old dwellings. But these were all filled up.
'Of what use now is this great building?' said they, 'come let
us forsake this useless stone-heap:

And the beauty of this little apologue is that you can read it
either way.

IX

But, although a student of English Literature be ignorant of
Greek and Latin as languages, may he not have Greek and Latin
literature widely opened to him by intelligent translations? T