Laudator Temporis Acti

John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), Memories and Milestones (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1915), pp. 117-118:

When I made this discovery, I determined to learn Greek, or at any rate to read Greek by the light of every facility except literature — a little of it anyway  — a play, half a play, a speech, a couplet — something that was in itself the thing I sought, and not a rendering of it. I had recourse to the garret of memory and there I found a small seedbag of moldy Greek, and with this I began experiments. On reëxamining the first readers and easy grammars which my whole generation had been put through, it seemed to me that they were admirable primers. None need be better. Then why did I not know Greek? The reason was that I had never followed up the beginnings. I had never read a page of Greek out of natural curiosity, nor had I ever seen anyone else do such a thing as to read Greek for pleasure. If anyone will read ten pages of English in the manner in which the schoolboy is taught Greek, he will see why Greek is dropped by the boy as soon as possible. Let anyone analyze ten pages of English, answer grammatical questions upon it, let him be asked to parse and give the parts of irregular verbs, to distinguish between varieties of subjunctive, and he will begin to loathe English literature.