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Untitled Article
§ tudy of the dead languages . The Babylonish jargon of grammarians was yet unspoken . The dark sayings of pedagogues yet Jay hid in the * wide womb of uncreated night / Neither did the fathers of poetry and history , nor did any one among their na *
merous and honoured family , consume the rising dawn of their young existence in digging for Greek roots , or extracting the kernel of an unknown literature from the husks of an equally unknown grammar . What Thucydides ^ in particular , was doing at an age when not a few of our own youth are wandering to and fro in the labyrinths of Latin verse-making , we all know .
We are desirous not to be misunderstood . We set a high value on what remains to us of classic antiquity : and consider an initiation into its varied and exhaustless beauties , an important part of mental training . It is that exclusive zeal for what is , oddly enough , called learning par excellence , a zeal which in effect gives to the ancients a sort of despotic sway over the minds of the moderns , and that alone , which we would deprecate and deplore . At the same
time we must maintain , that the necessity , in however mitigated a form , of devoting a large portion of our early life to the routine of learning dead languages , ( for that the learning is mere routine will scarcely be denied , however noble its ultimate uses ,, ) does in •* terpose a peculiar and a very material delay to the cultivation of the original faculties . Whether we have any adequate eompen - ' sation for this delay , we do not now inquire .
Did we feel it needful , we might find abundant support of our general statement of fact in every corner of the intellectual terra veteribus nota . Whether we look at the poets or the philoso- ^ phers of antiquity , in all the vast and varied ramifications of their several departments , it is the same . We see them inventing and creating . —At the outset it could not but be so . The entire world pf thought spread itself out , green and fresh , before them . A wide
field of yet untold wealth and loveliness invited the foot of discovery . The illimitable terra incognita of truth and beauty lay at their feet . The glories of the material universe , the hidden things - of the more wondrous universe within us , were yet unsaid and un ^ sung . No fear of spending its strength in vain , in the doing what had been done before , slackened the march or enfeebled the energies of mind .
Nor were the social influences under which antiquity wrote and spoke less strikingly friendly to life and power . No low-minded terror of critics and reviewers , no timid , creeping dread of the captious snarlings of the cold , dark , cui-bono scepticism of an unbelieving generation , ' repressed their noble rage , ' or ' chilled the
genial current of the soul . ' The Iliad was not meant for Quarterly Reviewers , nor did Herodotus cower beneath the anticipated scourge of the Edinburgh . The halls of the Ionian chieftains , the amphitheatre of Elis or Delphi , the forum , the portico , tthe grove , or the garden , —these were the scamea , —
Untitled Article
SfyS On th& Dettelopmeht of Gehius .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1832, page 558, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1818/page/54/
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