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§ 8. Sturm did not, like Rabelais, put Greek on a level with Latin or above it. The reading of Greek words is begun in the sixth class. Hebrew, Sturm did not himself learn till he was nearly sixty.

§ 9. With a thousand boys in his school, and carrying on correspondence with the leading sovereigns of his age, Sturm was a model of the successful man. But in the end “the religious difficulty” was too much even for him, and he was dismissed from his post by his opponents “for old age and other causes.” Surely the “other causes” need not have been mentioned. Sturm was then eighty years old.

§ 10. The successful man in every age is the man who chooses a popular and attainable object, and shows tremendous energy in pursuit of it. Most people don’t know precisely what they want; and among the few who do, nine-tenths or more fail through lack of energy. But Sturm was quite clear in his aim, and having settled the means, he showed immense energy and strength of will in going through with them. He wanted to restore the language of Cicero and Ovid and to give his pupils great power of elegant expression in that language. Like all schoolmasters he professed that piety and knowledge (which in more modern phrase would be wisdom and knowledge) should come first, but like most schoolmasters he troubled himself mainly, if not exclusively, about the art of expression. As an abstract proposition the schoolmaster admits that to have in your head something worth saying is more important than to have the power of expression ready in case anything worth saying should “come along.” But the schoolmaster’s art always has taken, and I suppose, in the main, always will take for its material the means of expression; and by preference it chooses a tongue not vulgar or “understanded of the people.” Thus the schoolmasters with Sturm at their head set themselves to teach words—foreign words, and allowed their pupils to study nothing else, not even the mother tongue. The satirist who wrote Hudibras has stated for us the result—