"And She Was French"

The secret of Latin teaching, as revealed in the Atlantic Monthly by Harvard's great 72-year-old classicist emeritus, Edward Kennard Rand (who served as an exchange professor at the Sorbonne a decade ago):

"The subject was elementary Latin. The teacher was a young woman fair-and-twenty. Her pretty face, her gay smile, the exquisite taste of her simple dress, were prepossessing; and, as Meredith has it, 'And she was French.' . . . There were no dull eyes or yawning mouths in that room. There she sat in graceful majesty, as though she were presiding over an assembly of philosophers. On the questions she propounded--is it dative or ablative? why is the subjunctive used?--hung the grave issues of life."

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