American citizens are educated or how they ought to be, I tell him beforehand, in the plain language which it would do people of his stamp good if they heard oftener, that it is because I know too well both the evils existing and the probable results of a better system, because my advice tends to spoil his trade, that he would like to keep me from being heard. And now to the subject of this chapter.

Were I to be questioned by an educated foreigner, an Englishman or Frenchman, German, Hollander, or Dane, upon the standard of scholarship in our Colleges and Universities, I should be obliged to answer, not having the fear of King Public before my eyes, that it was exceedingly low, and that not merely according to his idea, but according to the idea of a boy fitted at a good school in New York. When I went up to Yale College in 1835, the very first thing that struck me was the classical deficiency of the greater part of the students and some of the instructors. A great many of the Freshmen had literally never heard of such a thing as prosody; they did not know that there were any rules for quantity: it may be imagined what work they made with reading poetry. Nor could their teachers, in many instances, do much to help them; one of our classical tutors did not know the quantity of the middle syllable in profugus, almost the first word in the Eneid. The etymological part of Greek grammar (to say nothing of the syntax) was very imperfectly understood by the majority, and of those who made pretensions to scholarship there were not ten in a class who could write three consecutive sentences of decent Latin

prose. The system of choosing the tutors to whose care the

two lower classes were entirely committed, was enough to destroy any chance of rectifying the errors of bad and insufficient preparation. They were elected from the graduates who had taken a certain stand on the average of all their College course-say the first fifteen. Now a student might get among these fifteen-the "oration men "--by excelling in classics alone with very little ability in or taste for mathematics, or vice versâ; but he was obliged to take such tutorial vacancy as came to him in his order of seniority; so the mathematical man might be set to hear classics or the classics to teach mathematics. The consequence of which was that not only the bad men did not improve, but the good ones were generally pretty well spoilt by the time they came to the Greek professor's hands in the third year. Not only was the course for all the students limited to the same books, and very small in quantity, so as to keep it at the level of the worst prepared (among whom were generally a large number of "beneficiaries" or charity students), but this small

*

quantity was badly learned and taught; a student with classical tastes had no encouragement for getting up his classics properly, for he had no chance of showing his scholarship or doing himself justice-his tutor could not appreciate him; consequently if ambitious, he was easily tempted to seek

* The only part of the first two years' course generally well learned was the Satires of Horace, thanks to Professor Anthon's labors, for which New England students are generally anything but grateful.

distinction in other things, the various associations for the cultivation of "speaking" and "writing" in which the College abounded. The only extras in which the scholar could exercise himself and attain honor were the three Berkleian premiums. Two of these were for Latin composition in the first and second years, and some queer things occasionally happened in the adjudication of these. Just after I left in '40 or 41, some enterprising youth sent in an exercise in Elegiac metre, a variation which so astonished the examiners (the compositions being usually in prose) that they gave it the first prize. It was published in the College Magazine, and lo! every pentameter except two or three had a radical defect in the metre—a spondee in the fourth place instead of a dactyl, e. g.

"Invalidos artus labentemque pedem."

He might well say "labentem pedem," sure enough. Nevertheless, after all this there was still a possibility of our learning something in the last two years from some of the professors; but to put the finishing stroke to us, by the beginning of the fourth year we were supposed to have become finished scholars, and further instruction of us in Greek and Latin was given up. When the third Berkleian premium was open for competition towards the close of this year-involving an examination in three Greek and three Latin subjects, with seven months of idleness (except three hours' lectures a day) to prepare for it, it sometimes happened that not a candidate presented himself! Yet the prize, as it was the only Classical one in the year and gave

some opportunity of showing scholarship, much more than the daily recitations which fixed the "appointments" or regular College Honors, ought to have excited some competition, to say nothing of its pecuniary value to those remaining in residence, which must have been an object to many of the theological students residing after their graduation. I never heard of more than one candidate except in 1839 when I went in myself along with a friend,* and the professors, after examining us both for the usual time allotted to one (four hours for six subjects, one of which was the whole Iliad!), divided the prize without any further attempt at discrimina

tion of our merits.

How much temptation there was in such a state of things to read anything not included in the regular course may easily be conceived. How much was known of authors out of the course, one little incident will suffice to show. A student writing in the College Magazine, quoted the lines from Lucretius,

"Tu pater et rerum inventor, tu patria nobis,

Suppedita præcepta tuis, rex inclyte chartis."

as a modern distich. From the context in which he had found it there was nothing very remarkable in his making the mistake, but it was a little singular that no one in the

gentleman those gave

* A. R. Macdonough, now of the New York bar, a of fine Classical tastes, and who under any system which tastes encouragement might have become a superior scholar. He had a way of reading off Cicero ad aperturam into elegant English, that would have made an Oxonian's mouth water.

place ever detected it for three years, and I presume no one has up to the present time. Fancy such an error passing unnoticed in a foreign University. Or fancy a Bachelor who wished to carry out his Classical studies, reading by himself for six months in a University town because he could find no one to teach him, as actually happened to myself.

Such was the condition of Scholarship at Yale ten years ago, and if I wanted to spoil a boy who promised to make a good scholar, I could not think of a more certain way than sending him to an institution so conducted. I speak within limits in asserting that he will not make as much progress in the whole four years as he ought to do in one, and may have made in one before or after quitting the College. A little strong language will I trust be pardoned from one who has himself been a victim of the system.

Yale is the largest College in our country, and one of the two most distinguished. The result of my inquiries has not led me to believe that Harvard is any better off. That the other Colleges throughout the country, many of which derive their instructors from these two great New England Colleges, are if anything in a worse state, may be easily inferred.

There is one exception which for the honor of our city I am proud to insist upon. Columbia College, New York, has always exhibited in its Classical instruction a marked superiority to the other similar institutions of the country. It is a fact which deserves to be more generally known than it is, that the standard for admission into the Freshman class at Columbia is higher both in Classics and Mathematics than