> As soon as the nineteenth-century method of analyzing the languages without ever using them started to take over, Classics immediately started to die.

This sounds absurd. At my high school‡ Latin and Greek were living languages, and we studied them, as we studied French, as a way of reading literature and understanding a culture distant yet related to ours. Unless you were an actual linguist, what would be the point of studying a language without using it?

‡ which was, I admit, a "Latin School"