Excerpt from A Book of English Prose: 1470-1900 When called upon to justify the scanty time allotted in English education to the national litera ture, defenders of the grand old fortifying classical curriculum. Have often pointed out that nobody acquires the art of writing Latin prose without inci dentally bestowing close attention upon a number of the choicest pieces of English prose offered for the purpose of translation. For those students of Latin who reached the standard of a good sixth-form, or of classical honours at a university, the defence was not without reason; though for the reduced number of classical students to-day it is possibly less adequate than it was, since the modern desire to find interesting and novel material sometimes leads the teacher or examiner to select a tricky piece of current journalism in preference to a model of pure style, just as it leads him in dealing with younger pupils to displace Caesar and his battalions in favour of a dialogue about a half-holiday and a cricket match. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.