amount of history, mixed up of course with a large percentage of valueless mythology.  “In grammaticis,” says Cicero, “poetarum pertractatio, historiarum cognitio, verborum interpretatio, pronuntiandi quidam sonus."[288] The method, if such it can be called, was not at all unlike that pursued in our own public schools, Eton, for example, before new methods and subjects came in.  Its great defect in each case was that it gave but little opportunity for learning to distinguish fact from fancy, or acquiring that scientific habit of mind which is now becoming essential for success in all departments of life, and which at Rome was so rare that it seems audacious to claim it even for such a man of action as Caesar, or for such a man of letters as Varro.  In England this defect was compensated to some extent by the manly tone of school life, but at Rome that side of school education was wanting, and the result was a want of solidity both intellectual and moral.

The one saving feature, given a really good and high-minded teacher, might be the appeal to the example of the great and good men of the past, both Greek and Roman, and the study of their motives in action, in good fortune and ill.  This is the kind of teaching which we find illustrated in the book of Valerius Maximus, which has already been alluded to, who takes some special virtue or fine quality as the subject of most of his chapters,[289]—­fortitudo, patientia, abstinentia, moderatio, pietas erga parentes, amicitia, and so on, and illustrates them by examples and stories drawn mainly from Roman history, partly also from Greek.  This kind of appeal to the young mind was undoubtedly good, and the finest product of the method is the immortal work of Plutarch, the Lives of the great men of Greece and Rome, drawn up for ethical rather than historical purposes.  But here again we must note a serious drawback.  Any one who turns over the pages of Valerius will see that these stories of the great men of the past are so detached from their historical surroundings that they could not possibly serve as helps in the practical conduct of life; they might indeed do positive mischief, by leading a shallow reasoner to suppose that what may have been justifiable at one time and under certain circumstances, regicide, for example, or exposure of oneself in battle, is justifiable at all times and in all circumstances.  Such an appeal failed also by discouraging the habit of thinking about the facts and problems of the day; and right-minded men like Cicero and Cato the younger both suffered from this weakness of a purely literary early training.  Another drawback is that this teaching inevitably exaggerated the personal element in history, at the very time too when personalities were claiming more than their due share of the world’s attention; and thus the great lessons which Polybius had tried to teach the Graeco-Roman world, of seeking for causes in historical investigation, and of meditating on the phenomena of the world you live in, were passed over or forgotten.