great master of rhetoric in teaching us what to follow, and sometimes quite as usefully what to avoid. I value him above all for this: that for those who know no language but their own there is as much intellectual training to be got from the study of his works as from that of the works of any, I had almost said all, of the great writers of antiquity. THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES.1 1889. THREE years ago I was one of those who gathered in the Sanders Theatre to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of a college founded to perpetuate living learning chiefly by the help of three dead languages, the Hebrew, the Greek, and the Latin. I have given them that order of precedence which they had in the minds of those our pious founders. The Hebrew came first because they believed that it had been spoken by God himself, and that it would have been the common speech of mankind but for the judicial invention of the modern languages at Shinar. Greek came next because the New Testament was written in that tongue, and Latin last as the interpreter between scholars. Of the men who stood about that fateful cradle swung from bough of the primeval forest, there were probably few who believed that a book written in any living language could itself live. For nearly two hundred years no modern language was continuously and systematically taught here. In the latter half of the last century a stray 1 An address before the Modern Language Association of America. Frenchman was caught now and then, and kept as long as he could endure the baiting of his pupils. After failing as a teacher of his mother-tongue, he commonly turned dancing-master, a calling which public opinion seems to have put on the same intellectual level with the other. Whatever haphazard teaching of French there may have been was, no doubt, for the benefit of those youth of the better classes who might go abroad after taking their degrees. By hook or by crook some enthusiasts managed to learn German, but there was no official teacher before Dr. Follen about sixty years ago. When at last a chair of French and Spanish was established, it was rather with an eye to commerce than to culture. It indicates a very remarkable, and, I think, wholesome change in our way of looking at things that I should now be addressing a numerous Society composed wholly of men engaged in teaching thoroughly and scientifically the very languages once deemed unworthy to be taught at all except as a social accomplishment or as a commercial subsidiary. There are now, I believe, as many teachers in that single department of Harvard College as sufficed for the entire undergraduate course when I took my first degree. And this change has taken place within two generations. 1 Mr. George Bancroft told me that he learned German of Professor Sydney Willard, who, himself self-taught, had no notion of its pronunciation. One instructor in French we had, a little more than a century ago, in Albert Gallatin, a Swiss, afterwards eminent as a teacher in statesmanship and diplomacy. There was no regularly appointed tutor in French before 1806. Τῷ δ ̓ ἤδη δύο μὲν γενεαὶ μερόπων ἀνθρώπων Ἐφθίαθ ̓. I make this familiar quotation for two reasons: because Chapman translates μeрów "divers-languaged," which is apt for our occasion, and because it enables me to make an easier transition to what I am about to say; namely, that I rise to address you not without a certain feeling of embarrassment. For every man is, more or less consciously, the prisoner of his date, and I must confess that I was a great while in emancipating myself from the formula which prescribed the Greek and Latin Classics as the canonical books of that infallible Church of Culture outside of which there could be no salvation, none, at least, that was orthodox. Indeed, I am not sure that I have wholly emancipated myself even yet. The old phrases (for mere phrases they had mostly come to be) still sing in my ears with a pleasing if not a prevailing enchantment. The traditions which had dictated this formula were of long standing and of eminent respectability. They dated back to the exemplaria Græca of Horace. For centuries the languages which served men for all the occasions of private life were put under a ban, and the revival of learning extended this outlawry to the literature, such as it was, that had found vent through them. Even the authors of that literature tacitly admitted the justice of such condemnation when they used the word Latin as meaning language par excellence, just as the Newfoundlanders say fish when they mean cod. They could be witty, eloquent, pathetic, poetical, competent, in a word, to every demand of their daily lives, in their mother-tongue, as the Greeks and Romans had been in theirs, but all this would not do; what was so embalmed would not keep. All the prudent and forethoughtful among them accordingly were careful to put their thoughts and fancies, or what with them supplied the place of these commodities, into Latin as the one infallible pickle. They forgot the salt, to be sure, an ingredient which the author alone can furnish. For it is not the language in which a man writes, but what he has been able to make that language say or sing, that resists decay. Yet men were naturally a great while in reaching this conviction.. They thought it was not good form, as the phrase is, to be pleased with what, and what alone, really touched them home. The reproach— at vestri proavi rang deterrent in their ears. The author of "Partonopeus de Blois," it is true, plucks up a proper spirit: "Cil clerc dient que n'est pas sens Cil le perdent qui ne font rien Moult plus que je ne fac le mien." And the sarcasm of the last couplet was more biting even than the author thought it. Those moderns who wrote in Latin truly ne faisoient rien, for I cannot recollect any work of the kind that has in any sense survived as literature, unless it |