some day a teacher of genius will devise and embody in a book a course
of class lessons, sustained by simple practice and written work, that
would attain this end. But, indeed, after all is said and done, music
is the most detached and the purest of arts, the most accessory of
attainments.] Apart from the piano work, the special teaching of
elegant accomplishments seems just at present on the wane. And on the
whole I think what one might call useful or catchpenny accomplishments
are also passing their zenith--shorthand lessons, book-keeping lessons,
and such-like impostures upon parental credulity.

There is, however, a thing that was once done in schools as a
convenient accomplishment, and which has--with that increase in
communication which is the salient material fact of the nineteenth
century--developed in Western Europe to the dimensions of a political
necessity, and that is the teaching of one or more modern foreign
languages. The language-teaching of all previous periods has been done
with a view to culture, artistic, as in the case of Elizabethan
Italian, or intellectual as with English Latin. But the language-
teaching of to-day is deliberately, almost conscientiously, not for
culture. It would, I am sure, be a very painful and shocking thought
indeed to an English parent to think that French was taught in school
with a view to reading French books. It is taught as a vulgar necessity
for purposes of vulgar communication. The stirring together of the
populations that is going on, the fashion and facilities for travel,
the production of the radii from the trading foci, are rapidly making a
commonplace knowledge of French, German, and Italian a necessity to the
merchant and tradesman, and the ever more extensive travelling class.
So that so far as Europe goes, one may very well regard this modern
modern-language teaching as--with the modern mathematics--an extension
of the _trivium_, of the apparatus, that is, of thought and