Laudator Temporis Acti

J. Irving Manatt, Aegean Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914), p. 8:

What a language teacher is Experience—especially when one gets into a scrape and must get out of it again by dint of Greek! It throws people together and lets loose the stammering tongue. Moreover, to learn one language one should isolate himself from every other. It is so easy to slide into the more familiar when you can. A hungry tramp will saw wood and the stupid Barbarian will speak Greek—if he must. I suspect there are shoals of lads in our schools and colleges who will never catch it except by this sort of exposure and isolation; and it would be money saved to scatter some ship-loads of them among these 'Isles of Greece.' They would gain, too, more than mere language: what a revelation of Nature at her loveliest, of antique life surviving in its strength and simplicity! One summer in the Cyclades should prepare even the schoolboy Philistine to enjoy his Homer and to find choice society in Plutarch. What our Greek needs is the touch of reality, the warm breath of life: undo the cerements and roll away the stone. Greek is not dead—at least, out of school!