The Hesperian / (Lincoln, Neb.) 1885-1899, June 09, 1894, Page 6, Image 6
6 THE HESPERIAN . t iv grow tired of a thing one has once liked;' every recitation is like meeting an old sweet heart concerning whom one has been disil lusioned. Greek is a very unsatisfactory sweetheart, she is too old and wrinkled and exacts too much and gives too little in re turn. Besides, she can't expect to hold her own forever against the poetry of younger, fairer and warmer-hearted nations. Then she hasn't the trick of exciting one enough to be stimulating. Still, for all that one can't pass his examinations by filling up the aching void of blank pages with invectives or Greek, and I privately suspected that the serener side of me which had made it possible for me to like Greek once was going to the dogs very rapidly, and-1 did not altogether fancy the idea. As I was meditating on the possibilities of ever catching up, a tall, imposing person age, resembling a statute I had seen, and also the professor of zoology entered the box and took a familiar pose. Ho was in evening dress and wore it with the air of one accustomed to it. He fixed his electric blue eyes upon me and I whinced a little, remem bering the amount of laboratory work I had not done. "Professor " I gasped. "No," he responded pleasantly, "1 am .only the Apollo, the Belvidere, number 427, Vatican gallery." I sat in my chair and bit my lip to bo sure that I was awake. "Awfully glad to meet you, Apollo. I had the pleasure in Rome last summer, but our acquaintance was necessarily brief." "Yes; I am busy there in the day, but I have my nights off." "I must ask your pardon, but indeed I scarcely know you. Dress makes a groat difference," I murmured apologetically. He gave a Bhrug of impatience and sank into a chair beside me. "That's the trouble with you college men, you are always looking for us in the shells we cast off ages ago. In fact, you don't care t for us at all, its the shells you are after. You don't care for Aristotle's philosophy, its the dato of his birth you want. You never think of the poetry of Sophocles, it's his poetic constructions you gloat over; you read the Choruses just to pick out the Doric forms. You don't care for me except as you can make mo fit into your little solar myth theories." Now it was a new thing for me to be taken to task for my devotion to Greek grammar, and novel situations always amuse mo. "But, my dear deity, grammar is the prop and stay of modern education, it is the source of all culture." "Grammar," said Apollo, reflectively, as . ho lit a cigarette, "is an invention of the devil, his best and most effective. In the middle ages when ho set out to corrupt the spirituality of the christian world, he tried demons, and torture, and divisions of creed, but they all failed. A.t last he tried Greek grammar, and triumphed." "Well, if this is true it ill becomes you to say it. You ought to be loyal. Is this all the poor Athenians get for their goldon tripods and smoking hecatombs?" "The Athenians were a good people in their day, but their day was very many cen turies ago and the world has grown since then. Your babies in their nurseries know more than Socrates ever dreamed of. If you had a son who was such a blooming idiot in natural sciences or Pythogoras, you would boot him, you know you would. Yes, the Athenians were a good people, but they have loft nothing behind them but imbecile blunders." "And some of the greatest literature in the world," I said solemnly. "Yes, their literature is worthy of consid eration. There's Homer, for in stance, who can't bo duplicated. He is rewriting the Iliad on a type writer now, and is making groat im provements. He homer. has written anoth-