And at the time of Page's undergraduate life it possessed at least one great teacher.

This was Thomas R.Price, afterward Professor of Greek at the University of Virginia and Professor of English at Columbia University in New York.

Professor Price took one forward step that has given him a permanent fame in the history of Southern education.

He found that the greatest stumbling block to teaching Greek was not the conditional mood, but the fact that his hopeful charges were not sufficiently familiar with their mother tongue.
The prayer that was always on Price's lips, and the one with which he made his boys most familiar, was that of a wise old Greek: "O Great Apollo, send down the reviving rain upon our fields; preserve our flocks; ward off our enemies; and--build up our speech!" "It is irrational," he said, "absurd, almost criminal, to expect a young man, whose knowledge of English words and construction is scant and inexact, to put into English a difficult thought of Plato or an involved period of Cicero." Above all, it will be observed, Price's intellectual enthusiasm was the ancient tongue.

A present-day argument for learning Greek and Latin is that thereby we improve our English; but Thomas H.
Price advocated the teaching of English so that we might better understand the dead languages.