In an article on Classical Studies in America in a recent number of the Classical Review, Professor John H. Wright of Harvard acknowledges that the attention of classical scholars in this country is almost entirely devoted to the scientific side of language. They have a marked interest for points of grammar or of archaeology to the detriment of the literary study of Greek and Latin. In their annotated editions of authors they moreover confine themselves largely to servile imitation of German workers.

Nowhere is the truth of Professor Wright's candid statement more obvious than at Harvard. There is really no chance here for a student to become thoroughly acquainted with the sum of Greek and Latin literature before graduation. During the first two years, as is right, he is confined to a minute study of a limited number of works with due deference to grammar. But during the last two years, instead of having an opportunity to widen his personal knowledge of Greek plays or of Latin poetry, he is obliged to devote his energies to text criticism and details of syntax of a few specimens of literature. This system practically makes wide reading an impossibility. A student has but little time for outside work, and thus graduates even with honors in classics, without having read one half of the Greek drama. Consequently he finds himself far behind English or German young men whose range of reading is enough to discourage the most energetic American student. This explains why lovers of Greek and Latin even yet invariably turn to the scientific side of the language, why foreign poets, critics, essayists and novelists know so much more about the classics than American writers, and why William Cranston Lawton is virtually the only literary Greek scholar in America today.

The remedy seems easy to find in the establishment of courses in which an enormous amount of reading is done and the placing of such courses in charge of scholars whose tastes are literary as well as scientific. The number of students who would continue Latin and Greek longer than they do now would thus be increased, and honor-men would not have the lurking feeling that they are imposing on the world, by being recognized as proficient in languages of which they have not had either time or opportunity to study all the masterpieces. Such a plan would, moreover, increase facility in reading beyond the present insufficient standard. For it is an undoubted fact that the average student who has received second year honors and is thus recognized by the faculty as able "to translate Greek and Latin at sight," cannot read any Greek text without incessant reference to a dictionary, or at least without a strain to the attention which makes reading more painful than pleasant.