Classical Studies in America

MORE than once have I been tempted to write a history of Greek literature from the point of view of various characters mentioned in the records of the past; and one long chapter I intended to dedicate to a hoary old sinner who figures in Isæus, and who came to a disreputable end in his ninety-seventh year. Euctemon,”I said to myself, “ was a mature man at the time of the Sicilian expedition. He had heard the funeral oration of Pericles; he had passed through the horrors of the plague. He had shouted over the capture of the Spartans on the island of Sphacteria ; he was yet to welcome the return of Alcibiades and to witness the fall of Athens, He may have heard his elders talk of the Agamemnon of Æscbylus before it became an old play, and Pindar had not fallen asleep in Argos when Euetemon woke to the light of an Athénian sky. He may have furnished a chorus for Sophocles or Euripides, have heard a reading of Herodotus, and have voted for the recall of Thucydides ; he may have known Xenophon and Aristyllus, otherwise called Plato, and sat on the jury that condemned Socrates, and his judgment may have been warped by the Clouds of Aristophanes.” Now although I do not set myself up to be a rival of Euctemon, although I am by no means the senior of American philologians, either in length of days or in term of service, my personal recollections go so far back that I might write a history of classical philology in America that should bear a due proportion to Euctemon’s history of Attic literature; for my first year of professional study fell exactly in the middle of the century, and I have been engaged in academic work for exactly forty years. The middle of the century is a convenient point of reference, and the period of forty years suggests a good many things to one familiar with Holy Writ; among others, the wandering in the wilderness. In these forty years, unlike the people of Israel, the classical philologian has often had occasion to discard the old clothes of his theories and the old shoes of his practice, but if life be whole and hope be strong, let “ back and side go bare, go bare,” and if the shoes fall from the feet on the march, no matter, so long as the feet themselves are turned the right way. I do not make a claim like that which was made by the first great historian who wrote out of his own life : I do not say that I was at the age of discernment in the middle of the century, but perhaps I may say that I was not unobservant from that time on, and at the recent inauguration of Phelps Hall, a noble building which Yale has dedicated to classical studies, I ventured to bring forward a discourse which might he called First Leaves and Last Leaves from the Journal of a Classical Pilgrim on his Voyage from America to Athens by Way of Germany.

Forty-six years ago I set out on my pilgrimage, turning my face toward what was then the promised land of the classical philologian. Others had preceded me. Long before the beginning of the fifties men had sought German universities, — men destined to eminence, some of them, but their coming was spaced by years. It is only since the middle of the century that a steady current has set in from America to Germany. The honored Emeritus Professor of Latin in Harvard University, Lane, I found a leading spirit at GÖttingen ; Child, who but the other day closed his high career on earth, had just finished his studies abroad ; Whitney, even then a man of mark, was a new-comer in Berlin ; Goodwin was soon to follow. And since that time Germany has never lacked a cloud of witnesses to the devotion of American scholarship and the faith of Americans in German methods. I do not know whether the fervor of the American neophyte of today is as great as was ours. But in the early fifties, to see Germany, to enter a German university, to sit at the feet of the great men who had made and were making German scholarship illustrious, was a prospect to stir the blood of aspiring youth. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether a sojourn in Italy or a tour in Greece would have quickened the pulse so much then as the opportunity of knowing the great interpreters of Greece and Rome. A sojourn in Italy and a tour in Greece were even at that time regarded as a desirable culmination of a course of study in Germany, but of the great interpreters of Greek and Roman life very few knew Greece or Rome from actual vision, — few even of those who discussed subjects in which vision might seem to be necessary. So, for instance, it was perfectly possible then for an archæologist to write a book on Pompeii without ever having seen Pompeii with his bodily eyes. A certain charm, it is true, invested the discourses of those who were personally familiar with classic lands, and yet I am bound to say that the measure of vision was not the measure of inspiration. The kingdom of Hellas was within men who had never seen Hellas. To those who have compassed many leagues of sea and land to have a sight of the homes of classic life, it may seem strange that so many illustrious Grecians, so many famous Latinists, should be content to spend their days so near the august abodes of antiquity without a glimpse of Hellas or Italy; but it must be remembered that this craving for personal knowledge has grown immensely of late years, and that a new stage of study has begun. At all events, whatever disillusionments came to me during my three years in Germany, they did not come from the lack of that immediate acquaintance with classic lands which is justly regarded to-day as a matter of the highest importance.

What those disillusionments were, I will not say. Disillusionments must come, but woe unto him by whom they come. Keep thee sober and remember to distrust, for that is sense,” is a wise verse, and the animus suspicax which Bentley commends is the right attitude of the mature scholar, but the worst enemy of the novice is the carping fellow-student, and most of those with whom I associated were not censorious, but frankly receptive. — with due allowance for the amusement which the student always extracts from his professor. True, all the lecturers were not equally inspiring ; all had not the serene wisdom of Boeckh, the vehement affluence of Karl Friedrich Hermann, the rapt vision of Welcker, the imperial swing of Ritschl. There were then as there are now professors who cared little for the form of their message, and brought their crude ore to be transmuted into shining metal by the fervor of the students themselves. Then as now to be geistreich was a failing that only the highest genius or the deepest learning could excuse; and the discourses of many of the teachers were dullness itself, —certainly to the novice. Long lists of books read off in a droning voice without a ray of appreciation to light up the doleful catalogue, infinite discussions of infinitesimal points, endless divagations, hateful polemics, poor jokes, — who cannot recall these drawbacks to the lecture system ? But there was no man among those professors who had not in some way earned the right to speak from the teacher’s desk, and no matter what scandals were afloat as to the rapid promotion of this man or that man, there were no ignoramuses in the chairs of the German universities, no men who were appointed without some special training. This could not be said of American schools of learning in the fifties. And when our apprenticeship was over, we had the abiding conviction that we had gained what we had sought. There remained and still remains with those who survive from that time a profound admiration of the best features of German philological work and German philological method.

At that time classical philology as a department was flourishing, though not everywhere in the same measure. The sceptre passed from university to university, after the fashion of the skolion at a Greek banquet; and whilst there were good men at nearly all seats of learning, the personality of the professors determined whether this or that “ abode of the Muses ” should be famous for classical philology or not. At nearly all the great universities, however, there was no lack of philological students, and the lecture-rooms of the leading teachers were crowded, so that the foreigner, distrustful of his ability to follow the lecturer, often had to ask for the special assignment of a good seat. The seminaria were besieged by aspirants. There were philological clubs, philological circles, outside the regular university organizations, and the questions of the class-room and the seminary were woven into the web of every-day life. How greatly all this has been changed of late years is a matter of more or less painful notoriety. Some of the most brilliant classical professors in Germany have only a handful of students. The hundreds of the middle of the century have shrunk to scores, to tens, at the close. The foreigners are no longer a small percentage, but yield a large proportion of the class. At one lecture I attended recently in the University of Heidelberg, one fourth of the regular auditors were Americans, and of that fourth the larger part was made up of women. Possibly the quality has improved with the decline in numbers, but of that I have no evidence. It has sometimes seemed to me that the new programmes of instruction which are hostile to Greek and Latin may in time affect seriously the preparation for university work in the classics. Still, I have lived long enough to be distrustful of the cry of decadence, knowing as I do that the complaint was rife in 1850, as rife as it is to-day. However, the general fact of the falling off in numbers is too patent to be overlooked, and there can be no question that the ways of Parnassus mourn. Indeed, it might be maintained without too great show of paradox that the professor of philology in America is this day a more hopeful creature than his German colleague. Of course, the vast organized machinery is still in motion, still turns out a large amount of work. Individual scholarship shows a high tone, and he would be a bold man who should say that the philological performance of to-day is inferior to that of the past. But the buoyancy seems to be gone ; while the consecration is there still, resignation is the dominant tone. What are the causes of this undeniable state of things ? Glib answers are always to be distrusted, and there are many glib answers to this question. The enormous material expansion of Germany coincident with the rise of the Empire, that “ made in Germany ” which stamps the fabrics that are sold in every land under the sun, the pressure from above so potent in a state in which the lack of initiative strikes every man of Anglo-Saxon race, — are answers that leap to the tongue. And yet they do not fully meet, they do not altogether exhaust the problem. Sometimes the question has been asked whether the technicalities of scholarship have not tended to diminish the area from which technical scholars are recruited. But in my judgment that depends very much on the spirit in which technical scholarship is handled. The teacher who does not rise from the particular to the universal, whose special line of research is not a line of fire as well as a line of light, who leaves his students as cold as he found them, does not live up to the measure of his prophetic office. The love which is the fulfilling of the law was never more warmly insisted on, never more nobly exemplified, than by the greatest teacher I have ever known ; and if we are to draw any lessons for American scholarship from the state of things in Germany, we must look not only to the external conditions of advancing materialism, but to the internal decline of spiritual fervor.

The type of our scholarship is so distinctly German, — certainly as compared with the scholarship of England, — our foremost men have been so largely trained in Germany, or are at any rate so largely permeated by German influences, the fashions of our standards follow so quickly the fashions of German textbooks, that we cannot keep ourselves from asking the question whether our studies will not show the same decline, whether the refluent wave will not carry us back also. But at the time now under review the flush of the triumph of what was then called more confidently than it is now the science of antiquity had not faded out. The author of the Cosmos was not dead, and the Americans of my time loved to do homage to the bent old man whose wisdom was after all, as his death revealed, a somewhat sardonic wisdom. And what Humboldt was to the world of the physicist Boeckh was to the world of the classical scholar, and his Lycidas was Karl Otfried Müller, whose memory was passionately cherished even by those who never saw him in the flesh. Scholars still visit his tomb at Colonus, but as I stood, a few weeks ago, on the Acropolis and found that with unarmed eye I could make out his resting-place, it was impossible to suppress the thought how much more that little white spot on the right meant to a man of my generation than it could possibly mean to others. The school of Gottfried Hermann, which favored wide learning, profound learning, it is true, but favored it only as an auxiliary to the interpretation of the classic authors, — the school that held its own with Spartan tenacity, and fought a brilliant series of rearguard skirmishes, — was soon to leave the field or go over to the enemy. The philology of Hermann was becoming as obsolete as his top-boots. Only top-boots are still an excellent thing in muddy weather, and Hermann is still something more than a name. But his greatest scholar, Ritschl, in trying to mediate between Hermann and Boeckh, while in practice nearer to Hermann, was in spirit nearer to Boeckh, and the formula “ the spiritual reproduction of antiquity ” was the dominant formula of those days. The Encyclopædia of Philology was taken seriously, and the course of the classical philologian was shaped so as to embrace a wide sweep of studies. The only branch of philology to which the classical students of that time, as a rule, showed little favor was comparative grammar. They called it a root out of a dry ground ; but from that root sprang a growth that was destined to overshadow all the other limbs, so that nowadays those who are not comparative grammarians find themselves denied in some quarters the name that has come down to us from Eratosthenes. In 1850 the name of George Curtius had not resounded much, to use a phrase of Dante’s, but among the books that formed my little library was a copy of his Tenses and Moods, and his Greek Grammar was destined to make a great change in the whole method of the study and teaching of the classic languages. The neo-grammarian of to-day may smile at the methods of the older school, — very much as the bicyclist smiles at the wheel of the past, — for we live in an age of rigid frames and pneumatic tires, of inflexible phonetic laws and elastic analogical processes ; but those who remember the days before Curtius will never forget the debt they owe to the man who made the study of form and syntax a living thing. Explanation after explanation of the phenomena has been abandoned. The solvent of criticism has eaten away much of the structure proudly reared fifty years ago. But the life that was breathed into the study abides, and it is simply truth to history when one maintains that if it had not been for the impulse given to grammatical study by the comparative method classical philology would be a different thing from what it is to-day and a poorer thing.

Grammar, as has often been noticed, has a special fascination for Americans. It is not an insignificant fact that Lindley Murray was an American, though not an especially high type of the family of Apollonius the Crabbed; and it has been ill-naturedly said that, not unlike the Romans, we had a grammar before we had a literature. Rightly interpreted, grammar is the culmination of philological study, and not its rudiment ; and as one whose chief philological work has lain in one domain of grammar, I am not disposed to underrate its importance. No study of literature can yield its highest result without the close study of language, and consequently the close study of grammar. The lyric glorification of a misunderstood text does not commend itself to a sober mind ; and it often happens that those who sneer at the deadness of the mere grammarian mistake disdain of the interpreter of the beautiful for indifference to the beautiful itself. There are doubtless those who turn the strings of the poet’s lyre into clothes-lines for airing grammatical notions, but there are others who thrill to the antique music with an exquisite delight that the uninitiated can never know. In fact, those who frankly resort to translation — and translation is becoming more and more an art — are far more congenial to true scholars than those whose only object in dealing with the classics is to show their own mastery of phrase, which too many mistake for mastery of theme.

At the same time, those whom I should call the true grammarians have perhaps been too reserved, have kept their counsel too close. In these democratic days no one is allowed to have a hortus conclusus, and the consequence has been a rebellion against grammar. The grammars have become too cumbrous, it is said, and there is a demand for abridged and simplified grammars, which demand is rapidly supplied with the alacrity of the commercial element in nineteenthcentury scholarship. And surely when professed grammarians and, as the world goes, successful grammarians acknowledge that their labor has been in vain, and that a more excellent way must be sought, it is time to consider the situation, and to ask whether that demand is the battle-cry of a needed reform or the slogan of a passing fad. For my part, I have never trembled for the ark of grammatical studies. The steadfast forces that are moving it — the Philistines remind us that the Biblical ark was drawn by oxen—will bring it to its appointed place, and there is no need of a rash hand to right it. However horrified this or that scholar may be at the thought of banishing from the textbook the results of years of observation and research, still we have learned from the science of theology — which was so long the nursing mother of philology—the art of readjustment. And if a firm grasp of the great facts and great principles of the classic languages is to be supplemented by close observation of the usage of individual authors as they pass under review in the class-room, then the knowledge gained will be far more quickening than the learning by heart of exceptions and sub-exceptions in a crowded manual. But any change in the traditional method must necessarily emphasize what is, after all, the important thing in all instruction, the subordination of the voiceless textbook to the living teacher.

Side by side, unless I err, side by side with the retrenchment of the grammatical element in the school runs a tendency to widen the range of reading; and even the post-classic periods of Greek and Roman literature are receiving more and more attention from year to year. The study of literature gains, the study of humanity gains, and grammar need not lose. For the appreciation of literary form one cannot read the authors of the model period too sedulously ; but the contrast can also be made profitable, and it is astonishing how much wealth of thought and feeling lies hid in the ranges of Greek and Roman literature that are practically unexplored except by the editors, except by index-hunters. And so the reaction against grammar in the schools may only prepare the way for a yet more exact grammar, and at the same time lead to a larger grasp of the literature of antiquity. The new generation will read more widely, will read more sympathetically, and the close of the century will be nearer in spirit to the middle of the century than could have been deemed possible some years ago, while the improvement in method, both in grammar and in literary analysis, will make the new study far more exact and far more definite. The spirit will have all its old fervor, its old swing; nor will it be less potent for the absence of the vague phrase-mongery of an earlier day.

The study of grammar, then, which some years ago threatened to absorb all our philological activity, has not wrought the havoc that was dreaded by those who have remained true to the old ideal, and has only served to teach better and more exact methods in other realms of philological research. Indeed, I think it might be shown that no matter what the subject of our study the processes are the same; and only a few weeks ago I found myself interpreting into terms of philological science the wonderful revelations of archæological research. It may be that as children of the same age, we are all thinking the thoughts of the time and applying the formulæ of the time. It may be that the physicist, the biologist, would feel as much intellectually at home amid the reconstructions of Dörpfeld as would the philologian, and yet the abiding-places of antique life belong to the philologian in a peculiar sense, and a new era of classical study has begun in America with the establishment of American schools in classic lands. Let us therefore pass over the long years of toil, the long years of endeavor to inform German learning with the American spirit, and let us greet the new order of things. That sojourn in Italy, that tour in Greece, which, as was said in the beginning, were once regarded simply as a desirable rounding off of a course of study in Germany, are coming to be considered more and more as essential to the equipment of the classical teacher in America. Year after year veterans and novices alike repair to Greece and Italy. What Austria does for her teachers, American teachers are learning to do for themselves ; and this quest of immediate vision cannot fail to influence the studies of the present generation and of the generations to come. My personal testimony may be suspected. The naughty boy among the Roman poets tells us how hard the disease of love goes with an old girl : —

And he is also responsible for the saying “turpe senilis amor.”But there is nothing to be ashamed of in the enthusiasm of the veteran scholar for the lands in which his thoughts have dwelt for a lifetime. John Stuart Mill thought it fortunate that his journey to Italy “ occurred rather early, so as to give the benefit and the charm of the remembrance to a larger part of life.” Classen, on the other hand, did not see Italy or Greece until he was past seventy-three, — not until after the close of his long and honored career as a teacher. Indeed, it is hard to choose, if there must be a choice, between the two extremes, — between the vivid susceptibility of youth and the wider appreciation of maturer years. In either case, however, there passes into the soul a sense of reality that nothing save actual vision can give; and this sense, though one of the imponderables, is a precious result. I am not so enthusiastic an advocate of historical continuity as was Mr. Freeman, and yet I confess to a certain thrill when I was waked at Nauplia by a street cry that has resounded in Argolis every morning from the days of Agamemnon to the present, and when I heard the skipper of the craft that took us from the Gulf of Corinth to the Saronic Gulf giving his orders, as we crept cautiously through the canal, in words that Odysseus might have used to his steersman between Scylla and Charybdis.

“ To be busy on Greek soil under the light of the blue heaven,” says Dr. Jowett as he closes his grudging chapter on historical inscriptions in his Notes on Thucydides, “ amid the scenes of ancient glory, in reading inscriptions or putting together fragments of stone or marble, has a charm of another kind than is found in the language of ancient authors.” Quite apart from the value of the inscriptions themselves, there is an overpowering sense of immediateness to which no one can be a stranger, be he epigraphist or not. The Museum of Athens holds memorable statues, the Hermes of Andros, no unworthy rival of him of Olympia, a Poseidon not readily to be forgotten, but there is an old inscription of Thera down in the basement that has also a voice that no copy can emit. It was my fortune to be at Delphi when the great bronze was unearthed, a find which has made the year memorable in the annals of the French school ; and yet amid the joy of the occasion, my eyes reverted to the inscriptions which crowded about us, and Hieron’s effigy did not overshadow the name of Gelon. Two simple words, “ Zeus’ boundary,” cut in the living rock on a spur of the Hill of the Nymphs ■— two words, which symbolize Greek definiteness, Greek limitations,— stand out in the memory with Pentelicus and Hymettus; and there is a puzzling inscription in Gytheion which haunts me still, as does the sardonic smile of the Frog’s Mouth beneath Lycabettus, which greeted me whenever I looked out of the window of my lodgings at Athens.

It was the correct feeling that the sight of the soil, the presence of the monuments of classical antiquity, would give the student a firmer hold on the reality of his studies that led to the establishment of American schools first at Athens, and then at Rome. And while longer preparation and more ample philological equipment and more protracted residence are necessary to full fruition, while the familiar saying will always be true that what a man brings back bears a due proportion to what he takes with him, still there is in all cases an unquestionable gain, in some cases an incalculable gain, in the study of classical antiquity on classical soil. The gain does not always come along the expected channels, and I am afraid that the enormous access of vitality that is supposed to accrue from reading Greek poetry in the midst of Greek scenery is to some extent a matter of rhetoric. For one man who reads the Eumenides under the shadow of the awful rock of the Areopagus, or declaims the famous description of the battle of Salamis in sight of Psyttaleia, there are a dozen who pore over their Pausanias, which they soon learn to call Pafsaneeas ; and it is sad to see how scholar after scholar follows Baedeker in repeating the famous tribute of Pindar to Athens as if it had been originated by the rare comic genius who quotes it time after time,— a stock quotation if there ever was one. But there are not many who read Pindar on Greek soil or any other. There are not many who know from their reading on the spot how much or how little is to be gained from Aristophanes for the topography of Attica. But the sight of Greece stamps deep the lessons that we have conned at home and starts new problems at every turn. No man can go to Greece without a revision of his judgment as to things Greek ; the persistence of the old in the new will bring to all one’s studies, past and future, the feeling of an undying life. The beauty of Greece is largely a beauty of form, and takes the color it has from sun and sky and air. It is the same beauty as that which invests its literature with a perpetual charm. Every writer on Greece renounces description ; every writer on Greece no sooner renounces description than he essays it in vain, and violet and amethyst and purple, and all the tender and shifting hues that speech has vainly tried to fix are vainly spread on the palette of the notebook.

To know Italy, to know Greece, is to be more and more the privilege of American scholars, and in the manifold enrichment of their work, the enhanced vitality of their studies, I rejoice with a joy that has no tang of bitterness in it for all that I have been compelled to forego. For whatever else I have failed to do or to see, I have had the inestimable privilege of following the guidance of the master who has answered the call of his admiring disciples, and has renewed on American soil the charm that bound all those who heard him under the Greek sky. Once to have fallen under the spell of DÖrpfeld is to be under it forever. It is a spell too strong to be dissolved by analysis, and therefore I may venture to say that I have often tried to analyze it. Genius we take for granted in all such cases, but in this case genius finds a powerful backing in the sympathy of a profession that appeals to every one. DÖrpfeld is an architect to begin with,—as he loves to remind us, —and we are all architects, each man in his own way. And if there is anything in the human being that makes him aware of his kindred to the Supreme, it is assuredly not so much his goodness as his love of creation. There is no more interesting chapter in the Bible than the first. Every child draws houses, builds houses, and no man’s life is complete until he plans a dwelling for himself. It is a fascinating process to originate or even to follow, and no wonder that our arch-magician never seemed to know fatigue, that his voice was as clear and resonant and his eye as bright at the end of his demonstration as at the beginning. He was living over the life of all the architects of antiquity, and his strength was as the strength of ten.

Before one has any practical acquaintance with the methods pursued, the enthusiasm might seem misspent. I remember that when the photographs of Olympia first came to our western world,

I could not suppress a feeling of disappointment. There was Olympia before the excavation, a mantle of sand spread over the ruins, with summer hills smiling round the plain. Alpheios and naughty Kladeos were there, tucked in their beds and looking as innocent as if they had never dreamed of mischief. Under that mantle of sand lay the remains of temple and palæstra; and well did they sleep under that coverlet of seventeen or eighteen feet ; and the classical scholar might take his Pausanias and imagine what had been there. Perhaps his thoughts were busier with the chest of Cypselys, which he well knew he could never see, than with the temples of the Altis, which he knew could be placed. Then the ruins were at last brought to light and the photographs came. The earth was strewn with courses of stone and drums of columns and fragments of ornaments. It was as if the peaceful soil had broken out into a marble eruption. Surely this is no dream of beauty. But the beauty is there, the beauty is in the cosmos of the orderly foundations that have withstood so much; for what is beauty but a logical harmony, as Helmholtz has said ? Piece by piece the structure is brought back in all its original glory, with the added charm of the conquest of the human intellect, the human imagination, over the ravages of time and fortune. Flood and earthquake could not extinguish the thought of the builder, and the kindred soul of the modern architect reproduced out of the ages the work of his brother. The imagination of the hearer was scientifically stimulated to the vision of what was, what must have been. And so it was through all our itinerary from Corinth to Olympia and Delphi, from Ægina to Troy. Every phenomenon of every building had its place, its significance. Everywhere had history left its mark. Here sheep had rubbed the walls smooth, and there mice had printed the clay with their scampering feet. Every change in the structure betrayed itself to the skilled eye, and was pointed out by the unerring finger: here a charred beam, here a vitrified brick, here an arrested flight of steps. Such is the meaning of that ramp, such is the meaning of that pavement. Note the drums here, and the monolith yonder. One form of art gives way to another, and the old building is adapted to the new exigencies. The imagination is quickened, as I have said, —for what is imagination but logic with wings ? —and in a moment, the twinkling of an eye. the grammarian, the classical philologian is on his own ground, rebuilds the primal language of the race, restores the text of the faded palimpsest, and reconstructs the fabric of Greek literature, of Greek history. Now what is the rebuilding of the structure of Greek literature, Greek history, but the spiritual reproduction of classical antiquity, that very formula which scholars nowadays are prone to regard with a pitying smile? And as the years bring on the inevitable end, I rejoice, and would have others rejoice with me, in the recurrence of the cycle. Along every arc of that orbit Americans have done work of which no workman need to be ashamed, and to the methods that they have learned abroad they have brought the native acumen and the naive directness that mark all their intellectual activity. In the new fields opened to American scholarship and by American scholarship there have been memorable achievements, and not the least memorable are those in which American courage and American endurance have succeeded where others had failed or had fainted. The simple narrative of an epigraphic journey in Asia Minor which appeared some years ago filled me with the pride which the teacher always takes in a pupil’s prowess, and I never passed the rope-ladder that was twisted round one of the columns of the eastern front of the Parthenon without a feeling of satisfaction that a young countryman of mine, a young friend of mine, had solved a problem by the oldfashioned apparatus that old-fashioned lovers knew, while others had been content to ogle the inscription with the safe opera-glass or had tried to coax it down by the facile kodak.

There is no despairing of the republic of classic letters with such a history as ours, in such a present as ours ; and as I look upon the proud gateway over which Phelps Hall is enthroned, I behold in it the symbol and the pledge of the domination and the perpetuity of our studies. Through that gateway all our intellectual life must pass. Serene in the contemplation of the shifting currents and the many-hued waves of the time that is, judging at once and guiding, sits the genius of that past to which our studies are consecrated. We call that past the classic past, and in the old days when Curtius reigned we used to fancy that in the word classic itself the significance of our studies was epitomized. The Doric word klasis like the Doric column was supposed to tell the whole story of the artistic perfection of Greece. The massive Latin form classis was supposed to tell the whole story of the universal domination of Rome. But it is not necessary to reinforce by an etymological fancy the great historical fact that Greece lives on and Rome lives on, in those Greek souls and those Roman souls that have been called with the high calling of the teachers of the world, in literature and in art, in law and in government.

B. L. Gildersleeve.