Rome at the Close of 1867; Notes from Within the City (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos or missing text. Not indexed. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1868. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... cient for literary purposes, might be attained afterwards much more easily than is supposed." Now I do not say that there may not be a large number of boys who had better not learn Greek at all; all I wish is to guard against the seductive promise of that word " postponement." A dead language which is not learnt till the age of sixteen will, I fear, as a general rule, not be learnt at all. There is something in the mastering of grammar and dictionary difficulties which naturally belongs to the earliest stages of instruction, when learning is more or less compulsory. A boy who is conscious of making real progress in one or two languages (I speak from my own school experience) will be the very person to resent most the drudgery of having to carry on, pari passu, the low, childish task-work of another tongue. And if this is true of any language, it is true of Greek in a very high degree. The mere strangeness of the character has something repellent in it, so that even one who can read Greek pretty fluently (I speak not merely of what I felt as a boy, but of what I feel to this day) will often prefer, in reading an unfamiliar author, to read him with the help of a Latin translation. Then, again, the fact, noticed by Mr. Sidgwick in another connexion, that Greek has influenced modern languages so little, renders it specially difficult, and by consequence specially repulsive. Who that has groaned under the unfamiliarity of the German prefixes an and mit, iiber and unter, ver and zer, the force of which it requires such an effort to calculate beforehand, can doubt what annoyance a clever boy of sixteen would feel in constantly having to turn to his lexicon to satisfy himself about the effect of avd, Kara, /-tx, and napd in composition? Altogether, I believe ...