I congratulate you. I think you made the right choice in 1925. If there is any way on earth to convince young boys and girls that the present state of the world is not necessary, that we had order and peace and pleasure and lived happy lives before 1914, I envy the teachers who have that task in hand. I wonder whether you can make your students believe that delicacy and decency make all our pleasures more delightful, and that exaggeration and brutal unrestraint spoil all our pleasures for us - simply burn our pleasures up, and distort them until they are without any power to give joy.

I envy you, too, the pleasure of teaching the Latin tongue. I have loved it since I was a child, and when I first came out of college I taught Latin³ for two years. The beautiful cleanliness and austerity of that tongue, along with its unequalled brillance, make it a language to guide one through the this ages of bemired and bemuddled human speech. A few pages of Vergil⁴ at the end of a distracting day are like a cool bath after a hot game of tennis. I write you at some length, you see, because we have in common two very strong feelings: a distaste for the misery which the world sees fit to make for itself, and a love of that noble language which can always make a sentence do the work of a paragraph.