They are purifying, elevating, and
sustaining; they enlarge and liberalize the mind; they preserve it
against vulgar worldliness; they tend to produce highminded
cheerfulness and equanimity of character; they fashion, and shape,
and humanize the mind. In the Northern universities, the schools
in which the ancient classics are studied, are appropriately
styled "The Humanity Classes." (17)
Erasmus, the great scholar, was even of opinion that books were
the necessaries of life, and clothes the luxuries; and he
frequently postponed buying the latter until he had supplied
himself with the former. His greatest favourites were the works
of Cicero, which he says he always felt himself the better for
reading. "I can never," he says, "read the works of Cicero on
'Old Age,' or 'Friendship,' or his 'Tusculan Disputations,'
without fervently pressing them to my lips, without being
penetrated with veneration for a mind little short of inspired by
God himself." It was the accidental perusal of Cicero's
'Hortensius' which first detached St. Augustine--until then a
profligate and abandoned sensualist--from his immoral life, and
started him upon the course of inquiry and study which led to his
becoming the greatest among the Fathers of the Early Church. Sir
William Jones made it a practice to read through, once a year, the
writings of Cicero, "whose life indeed," says his biographer, was
the great exemplar of his own.
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