What Place has Old English Philology in our Elementary Schools?

Extract

Not long ago, the president of a famous American college, writing in praise of Greek and Latin as the basis of higher instruction, classed the study of Anglo-Saxon with the study of Icelandic or of Quaternions. All three were “intellectual luxuries.” If such is the judgment of so prominent and learned a man, what will that robust personage, the “ average citizen,” impatient as he is of all that is recondite and out of touch with the practical, say to my subject and the implied connexion between an intellectual luxury for colleges and the every-day fare of our ordinary schools? Considerable divinity doth still hedge the college, and what is done there: