[Life of John Milton by Richard Garnett]@TWC D-Link bookLife of John Milton CHAPTER III 24/30
He has not provided for Italian, but can it not "be easily learned at any odd hour"? "Ere this time the Hebrew tongue" (of which we have not hitherto heard a syllable), "might have been gained, whereto it would be no impossibility to add the Chaldee and the Syrian dialect." This sublime confidence in the resources of the human intellect is grand, but it marks out Milton as an idealist, whose mission it was rather to animate mankind by the greatness of his thoughts than to devise practical schemes for human improvement.
As an ode or poem on education, Milton's tract, doubtless, has delivered many a teacher and scholar from bondage to routine; and no man's aims are so high or his thoughts so generous that he might not be further profited and stimulated by reading it.
As a practical treatise it is only valuable for its emphatic denunciation of the folly of teasing youth, whose element is the concrete, with grammatical abstractions, and the advice to proceed to translation as soon as possible, and to keep it up steadily throughout the whole course.
Neglect of this precept is the principal reason why so many youths not wanting in capacity, and assiduously taught, leave school with hardly any knowledge of languages.
Milton's scheme is also remarkable for its bold dealing with day schools and universities, which it would have entirely superseded. The next publication of Milton's is another instance of the dependence of his intellectual workings upon the course of events outside him.
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