Let it not be said that I am now talking at random.  Let us descend to examples.  We need not be afraid of instancing in the most favourable.  I believe it is generally allowed that Mr. Pope’s Iliad is the very best version that was ever made out of one language into another.  It must be confessed to exhibit very many poetical beauties.  As a trial of skill, as an instance of what can be effected upon so forlorn a hope, it must ever be admired.  But were I to search for a true idea of the style and composition of Homer, I think I should rather recur to the verbal translation in the margin of the original, than to the version of Pope.  Homer is the simplest and most unaffected of poets.  Of all the writers of elegance and taste that ever existed, his translator is the most ornamented.  We acknowledge Homer by his loose and flowing robe, that does not constrain a muscle of his frame.  But Pope presents himself in the close and ungraceful habit of modern times;

  “Glittering with gems, and stiff with woven gold.”

No, let us for once conduct ourselves with honesty and generosity.  If we will not study the ancients in their own nervous and manly page, let us close their volumes for ever.  I had rather, says the amiable philosopher of Chaeronea, it should be said of me, that there never was such a man as Plutarch, than that Plutarch was ill-natured, arbitrary, and tyrannical.  And were I the bard of Venusia, sure I am, I had rather be entirely forgotten, than not be known for the polite, the spirited, and the elegant writer I really was.

To converse with the accomplished, is the obvious method by which to become accomplished ourselves.  This general observation is equally applicable to the study of polite writers of our own and of other countries.  But there are some reasons, upon account of which we may expect to derive a more perceptible advantage from the ancients.  They carried the art of composition to greater heights than any of the moderns.  Their writers were almost universally of a higher rank in society, than ours.  There did not then exist the temptation of gain to spur men on to the profession of an author.  An industrious modern will produce twenty volumes, in the time that Socrates employed to polish one oration.

Another argument flows from the simple circumstance of their writing in a different language.  Of all the requisites to the attainment either of a style of our own, or a discernment in that of others, the first is grammar.  Without this, our ideas must be always vague and desultory.  Respecting the delicacies of composition, we may guess, but we can never decide and demonstrate.  Now, of the minutiae of grammar, scarcely any man ever attained a just knowledge, who was acquainted with only one language.  And if the study of others be the surest, I will venture also to pronounce it the easiest method for acquiring a mastery in philology.

From what has been said, I shall consider this conclusion as sufficiently established, that the languages ought at some time to be learned by him who would form to himself a perfect character.  I proceed to my second enquiry, at what time the study of them should be commenced?  And here I think this to be the best general answer:  at the age of ten years.