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to be completed, widened and deepened, as opportunity offers, and certainly the reading of the authors will offer not only opportunity but occasion enough for it. However the choice of au- thors and of works henceforth is not to be determined by such considerations, but by their intrinsic value as thinkers and as artists, and by their importance as representatives of the peculiar civilisation of a nation and of an epoch. For in that great work imposed on mankind: the elaboration of an ideal out of the real world,— every race, every nation, every epoch of civilisation has its own task, one completing the other and each contributing its strain to the universal symphony, the ideal perfection of humanity. Which then are the nations whose lite- rature we ought to study with a view to this higher object: the understanding of the march of civilisation throughout the ages, knowing the share of each in the collective and progressive work, and appropriating to ourselves the best results, the most perfect fruits of this common labour of humanity? It is useless to demonstrate that we cannot embrace the whole, that we shall have to make a selection and that a college course can scarcely comprise more than three, at the most four foreign languages. Which are they to be? Every highly ivilised nation of the present day has assimilated and blended with its own civilisation the legacy of the prece- ding ages, the residue of all the moral, intellectual and esthetic culture of thousands of years. A German, a Frenchman, an Englishman that should possess all the treasures of his own na- tional literature would, with it and in it, also possess the best and most precious bequests of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and even of Arab, Persian and Hindoo civilisation. If therefore only the mother-tongue can be taught, as in our popular schools. it should still so be taught as to confer on the pupil the greatest possible share of that treasure of general and humane culture which it contains. If the course of studies will admit only of one foreign language, I for my part should give the preference to a modern one. For though the source of all modern civili- sation is no doubt partly, let us even say in a great part, to be sought in ancient Rome, yet the penetrating into the spirit and genius of antiquity, of so distant and so different an epoch, would require more time than under the supposed circumstances could be bestowed on it. Thus the study of Latin might still be very useful for that„formale Bildung“ I spoke of, but it would be nearly sterile in all other respects. On the other hand the general character of modern civilisation is nearly the same with the different nations, and yet so far diversified that each may find its complement and regulator in the other. For this latter consideration I would give the first place to French for Germans, to German for Frenchmen. He that possesses a sufficient knowledge of German, French and English, certainly has the key to all the treasures of human culture bequeathed to us by antiquity and actively increased by the combined labour of modern civilisation. If at the same time he knows Rome and Hellas from the sources, he will all the more easily and the better understand the great work that has been accomplished since the fall

of the Western Empire, through the middle ages and down to our own times.

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