The study of the classics means the study of the whole life of the two great nations of antiquity as preserved in the extant literature.  Now this does not contain a definite and formulated doctrine, it does not even, as might be said of the Middle Ages, mean one attitude towards the world; it opens to the student a field of extraordinary wealth and variety, and from this each will take that which he is able to appropriate.  To one it may be the mysticism of the Cambridge Platonists, to another the frank and pagan joy in life of Anacreon and Horace.  Rousseau and Grote will each in his own way appropriate the lesson of Liberty, while others will turn to the story of the militant and dominant aristocracy of Rome.  Goethe and Keats, Milton and Gibbon, Berkeley and Schopenhauer, will each draw their inspiration from the classics, but the result will not be to make them resemble one another, it will be to give vigour, decision, form, resolution, and dignity to the qualities of each.

And as it is with individuals, so it is with nations.  The schools of all nations maintained their classical curriculum; boys still began, and often ended, their schooling with the Latin grammar, but this did not mean, as it had meant in the earlier days, that the influence was the same.  There was indeed little in common between what we may venture to call the pedantry of Germany and the superficial elegancy of the Jesuit schools.  And so the classical basis did not prevent the school assuming a national complexion.  Let me give one illustration of the manner in which the classical teaching could take a markedly national spirit.  Perhaps the most effective classical teaching that we find in the eighteenth century is that at Eton, and it was on it that was founded the great school of oratory and statesmanship.  It was on Cicero and Homer and Demosthenes that Pitt and Fox and Canning and Gladstone (for the tradition continued to his day) formed their minds and their style, but they emerged from their training above all Englishmen, but Englishmen who had learnt how to give to their own national feelings a dignity of expression and nobility of form equal to that of the exemplars whom they had studied.

Now just as the finest expression of the English national spirit is found in those whose school training had been based on the classics, just as the Girondists based their revolutionary doctrines on Hellenic models, so almost at the same time the great political awakening of Germany and Prussia was inspired by what has been called the second Renaissance; and yet how profound is the divergence between Wellesley and Pitt, Humboldt and Stein, St. Just, Demousin, and Vergniaud; all were children of the common classical tradition, but how different is the use to which they put it.  During the centuries that passed between the Renaissance and the Revolution, the education of the different countries had then in fact been drifting far apart.  What has been done during the nineteenth century has been openly to carry into effect changes which had long been overdue and were already to a large extent operative.