Note 849 — Chapter XVI · The Method of Teaching in Practice.

In a recent article in the Fortnightly Review, November 1902 (“Are the Classics to Go?”), Professor Postgate, a distinguished English scholar, writes: “If the ‘dead’ languages and literatures are not to retire into the background, they must be taught as if they were alive” (p. 878).—“Translations from English into Latin or Greek is a most valuable training and necessary part of classical training; but it ought not to have superseded original composition.... From the first, speaking and writing Latin should go hand in hand with reading” (pp. 879–880). Professor Postgate calls these “improved methods”; improved, surely, if he speaks of nearly all systems in vogue during the last century, not however in regard to the system of the Society of Jesus, which always practised this system, as will appear from the next pages.