THE PUBLIC SCHOOL CURRICULUM 33

the cultivation of the body by games or manly or martial
exercises. The second was the study of nature, or
natural science as then understood; and I need not in
this assembly labour the point for, after all, the Ancient
Greeks were the fathers of modern science. The third
was—not the study of Ancient Babylonian, not the study
of Pheenician, not the study of Egyptian, or Syrian, or
any other foreign language, but it was the study of Greek
and Greek literature, 2» primis of Homer. That is a
good example for us; but we should be applying it, not
by studying Homer, but by studying Shakespeare.
“The fourth element in the education of those blooming
 young Athenian undergraduates was the inculcation
of reverence for the gods.
“Now those should be the lines upon which our
public school education should be run at present; and
to a great extent, or, at any rate, in regard to the first
and last, the gymnastic and the reverence for the gods,
there is really very little to be desired in the practice and
theory of our public school education at this moment.
“ But if we want to reform our education in the true
spirit of the Greeks and of Ancient Greece, then we must
make an alteration in our curriculum. We must make
English, and a knowledge of English and of English
literature and facility in the use of it, one of the corner
stones ; and, if a building has two corner stones, then
the other corner stone must be the study of the world in
which we live. On those lines I think we shall be really
paying the greatest homage to the Ancient Greeks.
“1, personally, of course, am not in the least afraid of
the disappearance of interest in the Greek language and
literature in our midst, even if our curriculum is reformed.
It can stand on its own merits. It is too deeply ingrained
 in our own literature and in science itself, It
is too much wrapped up in our religion ever to disappear
from the general course of studies.