Leaving out of account the crudities unavoidable in a purely amateur performance and the disproportionate prominence that any public effort not in the common line almost necessarily acquires, the production of the PHORMIO at Sanders Theatre is well worthy the attention of persons interested in classical education,- a category which ought to include all persons interested in any education.

Attention will be repaid in several distinct ways. First there will be a lesson in the language itself. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Latin language is more thoroughly dead than almost any other dead language. Partly from the formal, serious, and matter of fact character of the people who developed and used it (or rather used and developed it), and partly from the manner in which it has been employed for the last thousand years, Latin has become a kind of monumental language, associated with epitaphs and triennial catalogues. It has ceased to be a natural means of expressing thought to English speaking people. Thousands of persons can express thought in Latin and millions can use quotational tags of it, but only a few ecclesiastics are moved to think in the forms of the language.

To most English speaking people, even college graduates, a Latin classic consists of ideas with which he has become familiar in some other form and now recognizes through a clumsy set of symbols. The words do not suggest parts of ideas that unite as they proceed into larger and larger groups, but are mere signs as much as O. K. and C. O. D. That a Latin sentence was really an instrument of thought and expression, saying something directly as it went along, hardly enters their heads. And even a play, in which people have real emotions, talk, make bargains and swear, gives, when merely read, very little suggestion of actual thought. Few people have the dramatic imagination sufficiently to project the words into real life. But, when a character is impersonated on the stage, the words get a reality from the embodiment that can not be had in any other manner. Though Latin plays have the additional unreality of verse, yet, when the words are uttered by a real person with some, at