Note 25 — ANCIENT AND MODERN ELOQUENCE.

"For the exercise of the student's writing, let him sometimes translate Latin into English. But by all means obtain, if you can, that he be not employed in making Latin themes and declamations, and, least of all, verses of any kind. Latin is a language foreign in this country, and long since dead everywhere—a language in which your son, it is a thousand to one, shall never have occasion once to make a speech as long as he lives, after he comes to be a man; and a language in which the manner of expressing one's-self is so far different from ours, that, to be perfect in that, would very little improve the purity and facility of his English style. I can see no pretence for this sort of exercise in our schools, unless it can be supposed that the making of set Latin speeches should be the way to teach men to speak well in English extempore. Still more is to be said against young men making Latin verses. If any one thinks poetry a desirable quality in his son, and that the study of it would raise his fancy and parts, he must needs yet confess that, to that end, reading the excellent Greek and Roman poets is of more use than making bad verses of his own in a language that is not his own. And he whose design it is to read in English poetry would not, I guess, think the way to it was to make his first essays in Latin verses."—Locke on Education, § 169, 174.