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Why must these great ends of education be obscured or lost by the modern wonders of discovery, which should make them more easy of attainment and wider in circulation? Were the Greeks better off in education than we are, and, if so, why were they better off? or is all this alleged Greek superiority an idle dream of the pedants, with no solid basis in facts? If it is real, can we not discover the secret of their superiority, and use it with far wider and deeper effect in our Christian society? or is human nature of narrow and fixed capacity, and does the addition of wide ranges of positive science and of various tongues mar irrevocably the cultivation of the pure reason and of the æsthetic faculty? These are the problems which will occupy the following pages, not in their abstract form; they will be considered in close relation to the success or failure of the old Greeks in discussing and solving them.

§ 4. There have been only two earlier nations and one later which could compete with the Greeks in their treatment of this perpetual problem in human progress. We have first the Egyptian nation, which by its thorough and widely diffused culture attained a duration of national prosperity and happiness perhaps never since equalled. Isolated from other civilized races by geographical position, by language, and in consequence by social institutions, the Egyptians prosecuted internal development more assiduously than is the wont of mere conquering races. The few foreign possessions acquired by the Egyptians were never assimilated, and the civilization of the Nile remained isolated and unique. We have reason to know that this refined social life, which is perpetuated in pictures on the monuments of the land—this large and various literature, of which so many fragments have been recovered in our century—was not created without a diffused and systematic education. In Plato’s “Laws,”ssss1 the training of their young children in elementary science is described as far superior to anything in Greece. But, unfortunately, the materials for any estimate of Egyptian education, in its process, are wanting. We can see plainly its great national effects; we have even some details as to the special training in separate institutions of a learned and literary class; but nothing more has yet been recovered. If we knew the various steps by which Moses became “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” an interesting field of comparison would be opened to us; and here, no doubt, we should find some of our own difficulties discussed and perhaps solved by early sages, still more by an enlightened public opinion, showing itself in the establishment of sound traditions. And, no doubt, from the dense population, the subdivision of property and of labor, and the absence of a great territorial aristocracy, the education of the Egyptians must have corresponded to our middle-class and primary systems, together with special institutions for the higher training of the professions and of the literary caste.