Dr. Schliemann delivered an address at the Birkbeck Insti- tution
yesterday week, on occasion of the distribution of the prizes, in which he declared that if boys were only taught modern Greek first,—which he had learnt in six weeks,—they .could learn ancient Greek, and learn it so as "to read with the greatest fluency Homer, Thuoydides, and Sophoeles," and so as to write tolerably good dissertations in ancient Greek, in twelve months at most ;—he himself had learnt it up to this point in only four months, but then he was thirty-four when he began. We should like to hear what a groat Greek scholar would have said to Dr. Schliemann's very "fluent " readings of the stiffer passages in Thucydides, after only four months' study of Greek. Might not they have said, "More haste, worse speed " ? We will not deny, in- deed, that it may be a good hint to put the cart before the horse, and learn the derivative language before the language from which it is derived, for Englishmen certainly find Anglo-Saxon 'the easier for knowing English ; but as for Dr. Schliemann's com- putations of time for the average student, we take leave to doubt them altogether. As Mr. Cross said at Stamford on the preceding 'evening, what is wanted in education is a great deal of " patient, quiet," thorough work, and much less of superficial acquirements. Whether you learn ancient Greek through the modern, or modern 'Greek though the ancient, no average boy can learn to read Thucydides " with the greatest fluency " in twelve months, or three times twelve months, any more than he will learn ci German in tills lessons without a master," or will learn "a lucrative and profitable profession for thirteen stamps."
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