Both seem to commit the error of drawing their examples of
abuse from England, and applying their warnings to America.... Because
the House of Commons was once said to care more for a false quantity in
Latin verse than in English morals, shall we visit equal indignation on
a House of Representatives that had to send for a classical dictionary
to find out who Thersites was?...
Granted, that foreign systems of education may err by insisting on the
arts of literary structure too much; think what we should lose by
dwelling on them too little! The magic of mere words; the mission of
language; the worth of form as well as of matter; the power to make a
common thought immortal in a phrase, so that your fancy can no more
detach the one from the other than it can separate the soul and body of
a child; it was the veiled half revelation of these things that made
that old text-book forever fragrant to me. There are in it the still
visible traces of wild flowers which I used to press between the pages,
on the way to school; but it was the pressed flowers of Latin poetry
that were embalmed there first. These are blossoms that do not fade.
--Thomas Wentworth Higginson
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S LOVE OF LATIN
Andrew Lang, in his _Adventures Among Books_, writes:
"Saint Augustine, like Sir Walter Scott at the University of Edinburgh,
was 'The Greek Dunce.
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