LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNivERSitY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 v & \ N 
 
 X 
 Class ^ 
 
 
THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERHTURE. 
 
 THREE ESSAYS. 
 
 I. THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 By JOHN MORLEY. 
 
 II. HINTS ON THE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 By HENRY J. NICOLL. 
 
 III. THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LITER A- 
 
 'TURE. 
 
 By LESLIE STEPHEN. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
 BY 
 
 ALBERT F. BLAISDELL, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " THE STUDY OF ENGLISH CLASSICS," " FIRST STEPS 
 WITH AMERICAN AND BRITISH AUTHORS," ETC. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 WILLARD SMALL, PUBLISHER, 
 
 No. 24 FRANKLIN STREET. 
 
 1902. 
 
PRESS OF 
 
 ALFRED MUDGE & SON, 
 BOSTON. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. AN 
 
 ADDRESS BY JOHN MORLEY 3 
 
 II. HINTS ON THE STUDY OF ENG- 
 LISH LITERATURE. HENRY Ni- 
 COLL'S INTRODUCTION TO "LANDMARKS 
 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE " 43 
 
 III. THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERA- 
 TURE. AN ADDRESS BY LESLIE STE- 
 PHEN 71 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 SINCE the publication of a series of 
 articles two years ago in the London Pall 
 Mall Gazette and other periodicals on the 
 "Best Hundred Books," the discussion 
 has branched off on to the subject of 
 English literature. The leading English 
 periodicals have furnished one or more 
 articles for the discussion. Of the note- 
 worthy contributions, two have attracted 
 the attention of students of literature, 
 both from the reputation of the authors 
 and the real worth of their literary pro- 
 ductions. We refer to the annual address 
 of last year, given by John Morley to the 
 students of the London Society for the 
 Extension of University Teaching, Feb. 
 26, 1887, and a lecture delivered by Leslie 
 Stephen to the Students' Association of 
 St. Andrews, March 26, 1887. 
 
 The text of these two addresses has 
 been given in full in the succeeding pages. 
 
2 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Such men as Morley and Stephen do not 
 lecture unless they have something to say. 
 What they have to say on English litera- 
 ture is of special weight, for they have 
 made it a life-long study. Hence these 
 addresses are scholarly, crisp, and inter- 
 esting. To these two articles we have 
 added a third, " Hints on the Study of 
 English Literature," by Henry J. Nicoll, 
 the introductory chapter to his excellent 
 text-book called "Landmarks of English 
 Literature" This was written several 
 years ago, but it is of special interest to 
 students in connection with the two ad- 
 dresses. 
 
 Such notes have been added as will 
 serve to make the text more easily under- 
 stood by the general reader. It is to be 
 hoped that the three articles will be help- 
 ful and stimulating to teachers and stu- 
 dents of English literature. 
 
 ALBERT F. BLAISDELL 
 PROVIDENCE, R. I., August, 1888. 
 
UNIVE,-- 
 
 OF 
 
 s^L;r 
 
 ON THE 
 
 STUDY OF LITERATURE 
 
 THE ANNUAL ADDRESS 
 
 10 THE STUDENTS OF THE LONDON SOCIETY FOR 
 
 THE EXTENSION OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING, 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE MANSION HOUSE, 
 
 FEBRUARY 26, 1887 
 
 BY JOHN MORLEY 1 
 
 WHEN my friend Mr. Goschen 2 invited 
 me to discharge the duty which has fal- 
 len to me this afternoon I confess that I 
 complied with very great misgivings. He 
 desired me to say something, if I could, 
 on the literary side of education. Now, 
 it is almost impossible and I think those 
 
 1 The Right Honorable John Morley was born in 1838, gradu- 
 ated at Oxford and is a lawyer by profession. He was editor of the 
 Fortnightly Review from 1867 to 1882, of the Pall Mall Gazette 
 from 1880 to 1883, and of Macntillarfs Magazine from 1883 to 
 1885. On the formation of Gladstone's Home Rule Cabinet in 1886, 
 Mr. Morley was made Chief Secretary for Ireland. He has been a 
 prominent member of the House of Parliament. Mr. Morley has 
 made many and notable contributions to literature. Among them, 
 are "Edward Burke" "Voltaire," "Rousseau," and "Richard 
 Cobden." He is the editor of the well known " English Men of 
 Letters Series." 
 
 2 The Right Honorable George Joachim Goschen, Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer, born in 1831 and graduated at Oxford. He has 
 written largely on financial questions. 
 
4 ON THE STUDY 
 
 who know most of literature will be read- 
 iest to agree with me to say anything 
 new in recommendation of literature in a 
 scheme of education. But, as tax-payers 
 know, when the Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer levies a contribution, he is not a 
 person to be trifled with. I have felt, 
 moreover, that Mr. Goschen has worked 
 with such extreme zeal and energy for so 
 many years on behalf of this good cause, 
 that anybody whom he considered able to 
 render him any co-operation, owed it to 
 him in its fullest extent. The Lord May- 
 or has been kind enough to say that I am 
 especially qualified to speak on English 
 literature. I must, however, remind the 
 Lord Mayor that I have strayed from lit- 
 erature into the region of politics; and I 
 am not at all sure that such a journey con- 
 duces to the soundness of one's judgment 
 on literary subjects, or adds much to the 
 force of one's arguments on behalf of lit- 
 erary study. Politics are a field where 
 action is one long second-best, and where 
 the choice constantly lies between two 
 blunders. Nothing can be more unlike in 
 aim, in ideals, in method, and in matter, 
 than are literature and politics. I have, 
 however, determined to do the best that I 
 can ; and I feel how great an honor it is 
 to be invited to partake in a movement 
 which I do not scruple to call one of the 
 
OF LITERATURE. 5 
 
 most important of all those now taking 
 place in English society. 
 
 What is the object of the movement? 1 
 What do the promoters aim at ? I take 
 it that what they aim at is to bring the 
 very best teaching that the country can 
 afford, through the hands of the most 
 thoroughly competent men, within the 
 reach of every class of the community. 
 Their object is to give to the many that 
 sound, systematic, and methodical knowl- 
 edge, which has hitherto been the privilege 
 of the few who can afford the time and 
 money to go to Oxford and Cambridge ; to 
 diffuse the fertilizing waters of intellect- 
 ual knowledge from their great and copious 
 fountain heads at the Universities by a 
 thousand irrigating channels over the whole 
 of our busy, indomitable land. Gentlemen, 
 this a most important point. Goethe said 
 that nothing is more frightful than a 
 teacher who only knows what his scholars 
 are intended to know. We may depend 
 upon it that the man that knows his own 
 subject most thoroughly, is most likely to 
 excite interest about it in the minds of 
 other people. We hear, perhaps, more 
 often than we like, that we live in a dem- 
 ocratic age. It is true enough, and I can 
 conceive nothing more democratic than 
 such a movement as this, nothing which 
 
 1 See Appendix. 
 
6 ON THE STUDY 
 
 is more calculated to remedy defects that 
 are incident to democracy, more thorough- 
 ly calculated to raise democracy to heights 
 which other forms of government and old- 
 er orderings of society have never yet at- 
 tained. No movement can be more wise^ 
 ly democratic than one which seeks to\ 
 give to the northern miner or the London 
 artisan knowledge as good and as accurate 
 though he may not have so much of it, as 
 if he were a student at Oxford or Cam- 
 bridge. Something of the same kind may 
 be said of the new frequency with which 
 scholars of great eminence and consum- 
 mate accomplishments, like Jowett, Lang, 
 Myers, Leaf, and others, bring all their 
 scholarship to bear, in order to provide 
 for those who are not able, or do not care, 
 to read old classics in the originals, bril- 
 liant and faithful renderings of them in 
 our own tongue. Nothing but good, I j 
 am persuaded, can come of all these at- 
 tempts to connect learning with the living 
 forces of society, and to make industrial 
 England a sharer in the classic tradition 
 of the lettered world. 
 ~ f I am well aware that there is an appre- 
 
 /hension that the present extraordinary zeal 
 for education in all its forms elementary, 
 secondary, and higher may bear in its 
 train some evils of its own. It is said that 
 nobody in England is now content to prac- 
 
OF LITERATURE. *J 
 
 tise a handicraft, and that every one seeks 
 to be at least a clerk. It is said that the 
 moment is even already at hand when a 
 great deal of practical distress does and 
 must result from this tendency. I remem- 
 ber years ago that in the United States I 
 heard something of the same kind. All I 
 can say is, that this tendency, if it exists, 
 is sure to right itself. In no case can the 
 spread of so mischievous a notion as that 
 knowledge and learning ought not to come 
 within the reach of handicraftsmen, be at- 
 tributed to literature. There is a famous 
 passage in which Pericles, the great Athe- 
 nian, describing the glory of the commu- 
 nity of which he was so far-shining a mem- 
 ber, says, "We at Athens are lovers of the 
 beautiful, yet simple in our tastes ; we cul-> 
 tivate the mind without loss of manliness."/ 
 But then remember that after all Athenian 
 society rested on a basis of slavery, Athen- 
 ian citizens were able to pursue their love 
 of the beautiful, and their simplicity, and 
 to cultivate their minds without loss of 
 manliness, because the drudgery and hard 
 work and rude service of society were per- 
 formed by those who had no share in all 
 these good things. With us, happily, it is 
 very different We are all more or less 
 upon a level. Our object is and it is that 
 which in my opinion raises us infinitely 
 above the Athenian level to bring the 
 
ON THE STUDY 
 
 Periclean ideas of beauty and simplicity 
 and cultivation of the mind within the 
 reach of those who do the drudgery and 
 the service and rude work of the world. 
 And it can be done do not let us be 
 afraid it can be done without in the least 
 degree impairing the skill of our handi- 
 craftsmen or the manliness of our national 
 life. It can be done without blunting or 
 numbing the practical energies of our peo- 
 ple. 
 
 I know they say that if you meddle with 
 literature you are less qualified to take 
 your part in practical affairs. You run a 
 risk of being labelled a dreamer and a 
 theorist. But, after all, if we take the very 
 highest form of all practical energy the 
 governing of the country all this talk is 
 ludicrously untrue. I venture to say that 
 in the present Government, from the Prime 
 Minister downwards, there are three men 
 at least, who are perfectly capable of earn- 
 ing their bread as men of letters. In the 
 late Government, besides the Prime Minis- 
 ter, there were also three men of letters, 
 and I have never heard that those three 
 were greater simpletons than their neigh- 
 bors. There is a Commission now at work 
 on a very important and abstruse subject. 
 I am told that no one there displays so 
 acute an intelligence of the difficulties that 
 are to be met, and the important argu- 
 
OF LITERATURE. 9 
 
 ments that are brought foward, and the 
 practical ends to be achieved, as the chair- 
 man of the Commission, who is not what 
 is called a practical man, but a man of 
 study, literature, theoretical speculation, 
 and university training. Oh no, gentle- 
 men, some of the best men of business in 
 the country are men who have had the 
 best collegian's equipment, and are the 
 most accomplished bookmen. 
 
 It is true that we cannot bring to Lon- 
 don with this movement, the indefinable 
 charms that haunU the gray and venerable 
 quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge. We 
 cannot take you into the stately halls, the 
 silent and venerable libraries, the solemn 
 chapels, the studious old-world gardens. 
 We cannot surround you with all those 
 elevated memorials and sanctifying associa- 
 tions of scholars and poets, of saints and 
 sages, that march in glorious procession 
 through the ages, and make of Oxford and 
 Cambridge a dream of music for the in- 
 ward ear, and of delight for the contempla- 
 tive eye. We cannot bring all that to you; 
 but I hope, and I believe, it is the object 
 of those who are more intimately connect- 
 ed with the society than I have been, that 
 every partaker of the benefits of this so- 
 ciety will feel himself and herself in living 
 connection with those two famous centres, 
 and feel conscious of the links that bind 
 
IO ON THE STUDY 
 
 the modern to the older England. One 
 of the most interesting facts mentioned in 
 your report this year and I am particular- 
 ly interested in it for personal reasons is 
 that last winter four prizes of 10 each 
 were offered in the Northumberland mi- 
 ning district, one each to the male and 
 female student in every term who should 
 take the highest place in the examination, 
 in order to enable them to spend a month 
 in Cambridge in the long vacation for the 
 purpose of carrying on in the laboratories 
 and museums the work in which they had 
 been engaged in the winter at the local 
 centre. That is not a step taken by our 
 society; but Cambridge University has 
 inspired and worked out the scheme, and 
 I am not without hope that from London 
 some of those who attend these classes 
 may be able to go and have a taste of 
 what Oxford and Cambridge are like. I 
 like to think how poor scholars three or 
 four hundred years ago used to flock to 
 Oxford, regardless of cold, privation, and 
 hardship, so that they might satisfy their 
 hunger and thirst for knowledge. I like 
 to think of them in connection with this 
 movement. I like to think of them in 
 connection with students like those miners 
 in Northumberland, whom I know well, 
 and who are mentioned in the report of 
 the Cambridge Extension Society as, after 
 
OF LITERATURE. II 
 
 a day's hard work in the pit, walking four 
 or five miles through cold and darkness 
 and rough roads to hear a lecture, and 
 then walking back again the same four or 
 five miles. You must look for the same en- 
 thusiasm, the same hunger and thirst for 
 knowledge, that presided over the founda- 
 tion of the Universities many centuries 
 ago, to carry on this work, to strengthen 
 and stimulate men's faith in knowledge, 
 their hopes from it, and their zeal for it. 
 
 The progress of the Society has been 
 most remarkable. 1 In 1876 there were, I 
 find, five centres and seven courses. This 
 year there are thirty-one centres and sixty 
 courses. But to get a survey of this move- 
 ment, you must look not only at London, 
 but at the Oxford and Cambridge societies. 
 You find there that Oxford has twenty-two 
 centres and twenty-nine courses, and Cam- 
 bridge has fifty centres and eighty courses. 
 I say that the thought of all this activity, 
 and all the good of every kind, social, 
 moral, and intellectual, which is being 
 done by means of it, is in the highest de- 
 gree encouraging, and not only encourag- 
 ing, but calculated to inspire in every man 
 who has ever felt the love and thirst for 
 knowledge, the deepest interest in the 
 movement and the warmest wishes for its 
 farther success. 
 
 1 See Table in Appendix, 
 
12 ON THE STUDY 
 
 Speaking now of the particular kind of 
 knowledge of which I am going to say a 
 few words how does literature fare in 
 these important operations? Last term 
 out of fifty-seven courses in the Cambridge 
 scheme there were ten on literature ; out 
 of thirty-one of our courses, seven were 
 on literature. Well, I am bound to say 
 I think that that position for literature in 
 the scheme is very reasonably satisfactory. 
 I have made some inquiries, since I knew 
 that I was going to speak here, in the 
 great popular centres of industry in the 
 North and in Scotland as to the popularity 
 of literature as a subject of teaching. I 
 find very much what I should have ex- 
 pected. The professors all tell very much 
 the same story. This is, that it is extreme- 
 ly hard to interest any considerable number 
 of people in subjects that seem to have no 
 direct bearing upon the practical work of 
 every-day life. There is a disinclination to 
 study literature for its own sake, or to study 
 anything which does not seem to have a 
 visible and direct influence upon the daily 
 work of life. The nearest approach to a 
 taste for literature is a certain demand for 
 instruction in history with a little flavor 
 of contemporary politics. In short, the 
 demand for instruction in literature is 
 strictly moderate. That is what men of 
 experience tell me, and we have to recog- 
 
OF LITERATURE. 13 
 
 nise it. I cannot profess to be very much 
 surprised. Mr. Goschen, when he spoke 
 I think in Manchester some years ago, 
 said there were three motives which might 
 induce people to seek the higher education. 
 First, to obtain greater knowledge for 
 bread-winning purposes. From that point 
 of view science would be most likely to 
 feed the classes. Secondly, the improve- 
 ment of one's knowledge of political econ- 
 omy, and history, and facts bearing upon 
 the actual political work and life of the day. 
 Thirdly, and I am quite content to take 
 Mr. Goschen's enumeration, was the de- 
 sire of knowledge as a luxury to brighten 
 life and kindle thought. I am very much 
 afraid that, in the ordinary temper of our 
 people, and the ordinary mode of looking 
 at life, the last of these motives savors a 
 little of self-indulgence, sentimentality, 
 and other objectionable qualities. There 
 is a great stir in the region of physical 
 science at this moment, and it is, in my 
 judgment, likely to take a chief and fore- 
 most place in the field of intellectual ac- 
 tivity. After the severity with which 
 science was for so many ages treated by 
 literature, I cannot wonder that science now 
 retaliates, now mightily exalt herself, and 
 thrusts literature down into the lower place. 
 I only have to say on the relative claims of 
 science and literature what the great Dr. 
 
14 ON THE STUDY 
 
 Arnold said: "If one might wish for im- 
 possibilities, I might then wish that my' 
 children might be well versed in physical 
 science, but in due subordination to the 
 fulness and freshness of their knowledge 
 on moral subjects. This, however, I be- 
 lieve cannot be ; wherefore, rather than 
 have it the principal thing in my sons' 
 mind, I would gladly have him think that 
 the sun went round the earth, and that 
 the stars were so many spangles set in the 
 bright blue firmament." 1 I am glad to 
 think that one may know something of 
 these matters, and yet not believe that 
 the sun goes round the earth. But of the 
 two, I, for one, am not prepared to accept 
 the rather enormous pretensions that are 
 nowadays sometimes made for physical 
 science as the be-all and end-all of educa- 
 tion. 
 
 Next to this we know that there is a 
 great stir on behalf of technical and com- 
 mercial education. The special needs of 
 our time and country compel us to pay a 
 particular attention to this subject. Here 
 knowledge is business, and we shall never 
 hold our industrial pre-eminence, with all 
 that hangs upon that pre-eminence, unless 
 we push on technical and commercial edu- 
 cation with all our might. But there is 
 and now I come nearer my subject- 
 
 1 Stanley's Life of Arnold, ii. 31. 
 
OF LITERATURE. 15 
 
 third kind of knowledge which, too, in its 
 own way is business. There is the culti- 
 vation of the sympathies and imagination, 
 the quickening of the moral sensibilities, 
 an4 the enlargement of the moral vision. 
 (The great need in our modern culture, I 
 Which is scientific in method, rationalistic / 
 in spirit, and utilitarian in purpose, is to 
 find some effectivejierency for cherishing ^ 
 within us the ideajTy That is, I take it, 
 the business anoTmnction of literatun_ 
 Literature alone wilLnp.t.make a.^ood citi- 
 zen ; it will not make a good man. His- 
 tory affords too many proofs that scholar- 
 ship and learning by no means purge men 
 of acrimony, of vanity, of arrogance, of a 
 murderous tenacity about trifles. Mere 
 scholarship and learning and the knowl- 
 edge of books do not by any means arrest 
 and dissolve all the travelling acids of the 
 human system. Nor would I pretend for 
 a moment that literature can be any sub- 
 stitute for life and action. Burke said, 
 "What is the education of the generality 
 of the world ? Reading a parcel of books ? 
 No ! Restraint and discipline, examples of 
 virtue and justice, these are what form 
 the education of the world." That is pro- 
 foundly true ; it is life that is the great 
 educator. But the parcel of books, if they 
 are well chosen, reconcile us to this disci- 
 pline ; they interpret this virtue and justice ; 
 
1 6 ON THE STUDY 
 
 they awaken within us the diviner mind, 
 and rouse us to a consciousness of what 
 is best in others and ourselves. 
 
 As a matter of rude fact, there is much 
 to make us question whether the spread 
 of literature, as now understood, does 
 awaken the diviner mind. The figures of 
 the books that are taken out from public 
 libraries are not all that we could wish. 
 I am not going to inflict many figures on 
 you, but there is one set of figures that 
 distresses book-lovers, I mean the enormous 
 place that fiction occupies in the books 
 taken out. In one great town in the North 
 prose fiction forms 76 per cent of the 
 books taken out. In another great town 
 prose fiction is 82 per cent ; in a third 84 
 per cent ; and in a fourth 67 per cent. I 
 had the curiosity to see what happens in 
 the libraries of the United States ; and 
 there supposing the system of catalogu- 
 ing and enumeration to be the same they 
 are a trifle more serious in their taste than 
 we are ; where our average is about 70 per 
 cent, at a place like Chicago it is only 
 about 60 per cent. In Scotland, too, it 
 ought to be said that they have what I 
 call a better average in respect to prose 
 fiction. There is a larger demand for 
 books called serious than in England. 
 And I suspect, though I do not know, that 
 one reason why there is in Scotland a 
 
OF LITERATURE. 1? 
 
 greater demand for the more serious classes 
 of literature than fiction, is that in Scotch 
 Universities there are what we have not in 
 England well-attended chairs of litera- 
 ture, systematically and methodically stud- 
 ied. Do not let it be supposed that I at 
 all underrate the value of fiction. On the 
 contrary, I think when a man has done a 
 hard day's work, he can do nothing better 
 than fall to and read the novels of Walter 
 Scott or Miss Austen, or some of our living 
 writers. I am rather a voracious reader of 
 fiction myself. I do not, therefore, point to 
 it as a reproach or as a source of discour- 
 agement that fiction takes so large a place 
 in the objects of literary interest. I only 
 insist that it is much too large, and we 
 should be better pleased if it sank to about 
 40 per cent, and what is classified as gen- 
 eral literature rose from 13 to 25 per cent. 
 There are other complaints of literature 
 as an object of interest in this country. I 
 was reading the other day an essay by the 
 late head of my old college at Oxford a 
 very learned and remarkable man Mark 
 Pattison, 1 who was a book-lover if ever 
 there was one. Now, he complained that 
 the bookseller's bill in the ordinary Eng- 
 
 *Mark Pattison ( 1813-1884) the distinguished Rector of Oriel 
 College, Oxford, and famous scholar, made many valuable con- 
 tributions to literature. He is well known for his writings on 
 John Milton. 
 
1 8 ON THE STUDY 
 
 lish middle class family is shamefully small. 
 He thought it monstrous that a man who 
 is earning .1000 a year should spend less 
 than i a week on books that is to say, 
 less than a shilling in the pound per an- 
 num. Well, I know that Chancellors of 
 the Exchequer take from us 8d. or 6d. in 
 the pound, and I am not sure that they 
 always use it as wisely as if they left us to 
 spend it on books. Still, a shilling in the 
 pound to be spent on books by a clerk 
 who earns a couple of hundred pounds a 
 year, or by a workman who earns a quarter 
 of that sum, is rather more, I think, than 
 can be reasonably expected. I do not 
 believe for my part that a man really 
 needs to have a great many books. Patti- 
 son said that nobody who respected him- 
 self could have less than 1000 volumes. 
 He pointed out that you can stack 1000 
 octavo volumes in a book-case that shall 
 be 13 feet by 10 feet, and 6 inches deep, 
 and that everybody has that space at dis- 
 posal. Still the point is not that men 
 should have a great many books, but that 
 they should have the right ones, and that 
 they should use those that they have. We 
 may all agree in lamenting that there are 
 so many houses even some of consider- 
 able social pretension where you will 
 not find a good atlas, a good dictionary, 
 or a good cyclopaedia of reference. What 
 
OF LITERATURE. 19 
 
 is still more lamentable, in a good many 
 more houses where these books are, they 
 are never referred to, or opened. That is 
 a very discreditable fact, because I defy 
 anybody to take up a copy of the Times 
 newspaper and I speak in the presence 
 of gentlemen well up in all that is going 
 on in the world and not come upon 
 something in it, upon which they would 
 be wise to consult an atlas, dictionary, or 
 cyclopaedia of reference. 
 
 I do not think for a single moment that 
 everybody is born with the ability for 
 using books, for reading and studying liter- 
 ature. Certainly not everybody is born 
 with the capacity of being a great scholar. 
 All people are no more born great scholars 
 like Gibbon and Bentley, than they are all 
 born great musicians like Handel and 
 Beethoven. What is much worse than 
 that, many are born with the incapacity of 
 reading, just as they are born with the 
 incapacity of distinguishing one tune from 
 another. To them I have nothing to say. 
 Even the morning paper is too much for 
 them. They can only skim the surface 
 even of that. I go farther, and I frankly 
 admit that the habit and power of read- 
 ing with reflection, comprehension, and 
 memory all alert and awake, does not 
 come at once to the natural man, any 
 more than many other sovereign virtues 
 
2O ON THE STUDY 
 
 come to that interesting creature. What 
 I do submit to you and press upon you 
 with great earnestness is, that it requires 
 no preterhuman force of will in any young 
 man or woman unless household circum- 
 stances are unusually vexatious and un- 
 favorable to get at least half an hour out 
 of a solid busy day for good and dis- 
 interested reading. Some will say that 
 this is toomuch to except, and the first 
 persons to say it, I venture to predict, will 
 be those who waste their time most. At 
 any rate, if I cannot get half an hour I 
 will be content with a quarter. Now, in 
 half an hour I fancy you can read fifteen 
 or twenty pages of Burke; or you can 
 read one of Wordsworth's masterpieces 
 say the lines on Tintern; or say, one- 
 third if a scholar, in the original, and if 
 not, in a translation of a book of the Iliad, 
 or the ^Eneid. I am not filling the half 
 hour too full. But try for yourselves what 
 you can read in half an hour. Then mul- 
 tiply the half hour by 365, and consider 
 what treasures you might have laid by at 
 the end of the year; and what happiness, 
 fortitude, and wisdom they would have 
 given you for a lifetime. 
 
 I will not take up your time by explain- 
 ing the various mechanical contrivances 
 and aids to successful study. They are 
 not to be despised by those who would 
 
OF LITERATURE. 21 
 
 extract the most from books. Many people 
 think of knowledge as of money. They 
 would like knowledge, but cannot face the 
 perseverance and self-denial that go to 
 the acquisition of it, as they go to the 
 acquisition of money. The wise student 
 will do most of his reading with a pen or 
 a pencil in his hand. He will not shrink 
 from the useful toil of making abstracts 
 and summaries of what he is reading. Sir 
 William Hamilton was a strong advocate 
 for underscoring books of study. "Intelli- 
 gent underlining," he said, "gave a kind 
 of abstract of an important work, and by 
 the use of different colored inks to mark 
 a difference of contents, and discriminate 
 the doctrinal from the historical or illustra- 
 tive elements of an argument or exposi- 
 tion, the abstract became an analysis very 
 serviceable for ready reference." 1 This 
 assumes, as Hamilton said, that the book 
 to be operated on is your own, and perhaps 
 is rather too elaborate a counsel of perfect- 
 ion for most of us. Again, some great men 
 Gibbon was one, and Daniel Webster 
 was another, and the great Lord Strafford 
 was a third always before reading a book 
 made a short, rough analysis of the ques- 
 tions which they expected to be answered in 
 it, the additions to be made to their know- 
 ledge, and whither it would take them. I 
 
 1 Veitch's Life of Hamilton, 314, 392. 
 
22 ON THE STUDY 
 
 have sometimes tried that way of steady- 
 ing and guiding attention; I have never 
 done so without advantage ; and I commend 
 it to you. I need not tell you that you 
 will find that most books worth reading 
 once are worth reading twice, and what 
 is most important of all the masterpieces 
 of literature are worth reading a thousand 
 times. It is a great mistake to think that 
 because you have read a masterpiece once 
 or twice, or ten times, therefore you have 
 done with it. Because it is a masterpiece, 
 you ought to live with it, and make it part 
 of your daily life. Another practice which 
 I commeud to you is that of keeping a 
 common-place book, and transcribing into 
 it what is striking and interesting and 
 suggestive. And if you keep it wisely, as 
 Locke has taught us, you will put every 
 entry under a head, division, or sub-divi- 
 sion. 1 This is an excellent practice for 
 concentrating your thought on the passage 
 and making you alive to its real point and 
 significance. 
 
 Various correspondents have asked me 
 to say something about those lists of a 
 hundred books, 2 that have been circulating 
 
 1 " If I would put anything in my Common-place Book, I find out 
 a head to which I may refer it. Each head ought to be some im- 
 portant and essential word to the matter in hand " (Locke's Works, 
 iii. 308, ed. 1801). This is for indexing purposes, but it is worth 
 while to go further and make a title for the passage extracted, indi- 
 cating its pith and purport. 
 
 * The subject of the " Best Hundred books " was sharply dis- 
 
OF LITERATURE. 23 
 
 through the universe within the last few 
 months. I have examined some of these 
 lists with considerable care, and whatever 
 else may be said of them and I speak of 
 them with great deference and reserve, 
 because men for whom I have a great re- 
 gard have compiled them they do not 
 seem to me to be calculated either to create 
 or satisfy a wise taste for literature in any 
 very worthy sense. To fill a man with a 
 hundred parcels of heterogeneous scraps 
 from the Mahabharata, and \heSkeking, 
 down to Pickwick and White s Selborne, 
 may pass the time, but I don't think it 
 would strengthen or instruct or delight. 
 For instance, it is a mistake to think that 
 every book that has a great name in the 
 history of books or of thought is worth 
 reading. Some of the most famous books 
 are least worth reading. Their fame was 
 due to their doing something that needed 
 in their day to be done. The work done, 
 the virtue of the book expires. Again, I 
 agree with those who say that the steady 
 working down one of these lists would end in 
 the manufacture of that obnoxious product 
 the prig. A prig has been defined as an 
 animal that is over-fed for its size. I think 
 
 cussed in England in 1886. The Pall Mall Gazette [London] took 
 the lead in the discussion. For a symposium of the subject see the 
 Pall Mall Gazette " Extra " No. 24. See also Sir John Lubbock's 
 Pleasures of Life in The Choice of Books. 
 
ON THE STUDY 
 
 that these bewildering miscellanies would 
 lead to an immense quantity of that kind 
 of overfeeding. The object of reading is 
 not to dip into everything that even wise 
 men have ever written. In the words of one 
 of the most winning writers of English 
 that ever existed Cardinal Newman 
 the object of literature in education is to 
 open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, 
 to enable it to comprehend and digest its 
 knowledge, to give it power over its own 
 faculties, application, flexibility, method, 
 critical exactness, sagacity, address, and 
 expression. These are the objects of that 
 intellectual perfection which a literary ed- 
 ucation is destined to give. I will not ven- 
 ture on a list of a hundred books, but will 
 recommend you to one book well worthy 
 of your attention. Those who are curious 
 as to what they should read in the region 
 of pure literature, will do well to peruse 
 my friend Mr. Frederic Harrison's volume, 
 called the The Choice of Books. You will 
 find there as much wise thought, eloquent- 
 ly and brilliantly put, as in any volume of 
 its size and on its subject, whether it be in 
 the list of a hundred or not. 
 
 Let me pass to another topic. We are 
 often asked whether it is best to study 
 subjects, or authors, or books. Well, I 
 think that is like most of the stock ques- 
 tions with which the perverse ingenuity of 
 
OF LITERATURE. 2$ 
 
 mankind torments itself. There is no uni- 
 versal and exclusive answer. It is idle. 
 It was put to me that I should say some- 
 thing on it. My answer is a very plain 
 one, and it is this. It is sometimes best to 
 study books, sometimes authors, and some- 
 times subjects; but at all times it is best 
 to study authors, subjects, and books in 
 connection with one another. Whether you 
 make your first approach from interest in 
 an author or in a book, the fruit will be only 
 half gathered if you leave off without new 
 ideas and clearer lights both on the man 
 and the matter. One of the noblest mas- 
 terpieces in the literature of civil and polit- 
 ical wisdom is to be found in Burke's three 
 pieces on the American War his speech 
 on Taxation in 1774, on Conciliation in 
 1775, and his letter to the Sheriffs of 
 Bristol in I777- 1 I can only repeat to you 
 what I have been saying in print and out 
 of it for a good many years, and what I 
 believe more firmly as observation is en- 
 larged by time and occasion, that these 
 three pieces are the most perfect manual 
 in all literature for the study of great 
 affairs, whether for the purpose of know- 
 ledge or action. 
 
 " They are an example," as I have said 
 before now. " an example without fault of all 
 
 i See Burke's Select Works> Vol. i, Edited by E. J. Payne, 
 Clarendon Press Series. 
 
26 ON THE STUDY 
 
 | the qualities which the critic, whether a 
 I theorist or an actor, of great political sit- 
 uations should strive by night and by day to 
 possess. If their subject were as remote 
 as the quarrel between the Corinthians and 
 Corcyra, or the war between Rome and 
 the Allies, instead of a conflict to which 
 the world owes the opportunity of the 
 most important of political experiments, 
 we should still have everything to learn 
 from the author's treatment ; the vigorous 
 grasp of masses of compressed detail, the 
 wide illumination from great principles of 
 human experience, the strong and mas- 
 culine feeling for the two great political 
 ends of Justice and Freedom, the large 
 and generous interpretation of expedi- 
 ency, the morality, the vision, the noble 
 temper." 
 
 No student worthy of the name will 
 lay aside these pieces, so admirable in 
 their literary expression, so important for 
 history, so rich in the lessons of civil 
 wisdom, until he has found out something 
 from other sources as to the circumstances 
 from which such writings arose, and as to 
 the man whose resplendent genius inspir- 
 ed them. There are great personalities 
 like Burke who march through history 
 with voices like a clarion trumpet and 
 something like the glitter of swords in 
 their hands. They are as interesting as 
 
OF LITERATURE. 2? 
 
 their work. Contact with them warms 
 and kindles the mind. You will not be 
 content, after reading one of these pieces 
 without knowing the character and per- 
 sonality of the man who conceived it, and 
 until you have spent an hour or two 
 and an hour or two will go a long way 
 with Burke still fresh in your mind over 
 other compositions in political literature, 
 over Bacon's civil pieces, or Mafchiavelli's 
 Prince, and others in the same order of 
 thought. That is my answer to the ques- 
 tion whether you should study books, sub- 
 jects, or authors. This points to the right 
 answer to another question that is con- 
 stantly asked. We are constantly asked 
 whether desultory reading is among things 
 lawful and permitted. May we browse at 
 large in a library, as Johnson said, or is it 
 forbidden to open a book without a defi- 
 nite aim and fixed expectations ? I am 
 for a compromise. If a man has once got 
 his general point of view, if he has striven 
 with success to place himself at the cen- 
 tre, what follows is of less consequence. 
 If he has got in his head a good map of 
 the country, he may ramble at large with 
 impunity. If he has once well and truly 
 laid the foundations of a methodical, sys- 
 tematic, habit of mind, what he reads will 
 find its way to its proper place. If his 
 intellect is in good order, he will find in 
 
28 ON THE STUDY 
 
 every quarter something to assimilate and 
 something that will nourish. 
 
 Now I am going to deal with another 
 question, with which perhaps I ought to 
 have started. What is literature ? It has 
 often been defined. Emerson says it is a 
 record of the best thoughts. "By litera- 
 ture," says another author, I think Mr. 
 Stopford Brooke, "we mean the written 
 thoughts and feelings of intelligent men 
 and women arranged in a way that shall 
 give pleasure to the reader." A third 
 account is that "the aim of a student of 
 literature is to know the best that has 
 been thought in the world." Definitions 
 always appear to me in these things to be 
 in the nature of vanity. I feel that the 
 attempt to be compact in the definition of 
 literature, ends in something that is rather 
 meagre, partial, starved, and unsatisfac- 
 tory. I turn to the answer given by a 
 great French writer to a question not 
 quite the same; viz., "What is a classic?" 
 Literature consists of a whole body of 
 classics in the true sense of the word, and 
 a classic, as Saint Beauve defines him, is 
 an "author who has enriched the human 
 mind, who has really added to its treasure, 
 who has got it to take a step farther ; who 
 has discovered some unequivocal moral 
 truth, or penetrated to some eternal pas- 
 sion, in that heart of man where it seemed 
 
OF LITERATURE. 2Q 
 
 as though all were known and explored; 
 who has produced his thought, or his obser- 
 vation, or his invention under some form, 
 no matter what, so it be great, large, 
 acute, and reasonable, sane and beautiful 
 in itself; who has spoken to all in a style 
 of his own, yet a style which finds itself a 
 style of everybody, in a style that is 
 at once new and antique, and is the con- 
 temporary of all the ages." At a single 
 hearing you may not take all that in ; but if 
 you should have any opportunity of recur- 
 ring to it you will find this a satisfactory, 
 full, and instructive account of what is a 
 classic, and will find in it a full and satis- 
 factory account of what those who have 
 thought most on literature hope to get 
 from it, and most would desire to confer 
 upon others by it. Literature consists of 
 all the books and they are not so many 
 where moral truth and human passion 
 are touched with a certain largeness, san- 
 ity, and attraction of form. My notion of 
 the literary student is one who through 
 books, explores the strange voyages of 
 man's moral reason, the impulses of the 
 human heart, the chances and changes 
 that have overtaken human ideals of virtue 
 and happiness, of conduct and manners, 
 and the shifting fortunes of great concep- 
 tions of truth and virtue. Poets, dramat- 
 ists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, 
 
3O ON THE STUDY 
 
 the great preachers, the character-writers, 
 the maxim-writers, the great political ora- 
 
 Itors they are all literature in so far as 
 they teach us to know man and to know 
 human nature. This is what makes litera- 
 ture, rightly sifted and selected, and right- 
 ly studied, not the mere elegant trifling 
 that it is so often and so erroneously sup- 
 posed to be, but a proper instrument for a 
 
 1 systematic training of the imagination and 
 sympathies, and of a genial and varied 
 moral sensibility. 
 
 From this point of view let me remind 
 you that books are not the products of 
 accident and caprice. As Goethe said, if 
 you would understand an author, you must 
 understand his age. The same thing is 
 just as true of a book. If you would com- 
 
 ^j^rehend it, you must know the age. There 
 is an order ; there are causes and relations. 
 There are relations between great composi- 
 tions and the societies from which they 
 have emerged. I would put it in this way 
 to you, that just as the naturalist strives 
 to understand and to explain the distribu- 
 tion of plants and animals over the surface 
 of the globe, to connect their presence or 
 their absence with the great geological, 
 climatic, and oceanic changes, so the stu- 
 dent of literature, if he be wise, undertakes 
 an ordered and connected survey of ideas, 
 of tastes, of sentiments, of imagination, of 
 
OF LITERATURE. 31 
 
 humor, of invention, as they affect and as 
 they are affected by the ever-changing 
 experiences of human nature, and the 
 manifold variations that time and circum- 
 stances are incessantly working in human 
 society. 
 
 It is because I am possessed, and desire 
 to see others possessed, by that conception 
 of literary study, that I watch with the great- 
 est sympathy and admiration the efforts of 
 those who are striving so hard, and, I hope, 
 so successfully, to bring the systematic and 
 methodical study of our own literature, in 
 connection with other literatures, among 
 subjects for teaching and examination in 
 the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. 
 I regard those efforts with the liveliest in- 
 terest and sympathy. Everybody agrees 
 that an educated man ought to have a gene- 
 ral notion of the course of the great out- 
 ward events of European history. So, too, 
 an educated man ought to have a general 
 notion of the course of all those inward 
 thoughts and moods which find their ex- 
 pression in literature. I think that in 
 cultivating the study of literature, as I 
 have rather laboriously endeavored to de- 
 fine it, you will be cultivating the most im- 
 portant side of history. Knowledge of it \ 
 gives stability and substance to character. 1 
 It gives us a view of the ground we stand 
 on. It gives us a solid backing of prece- 
 
32 ON THE STUDY 
 
 dent and experience. It teaches us where 
 we are. It protects us against imposture 
 and surprise. 
 
 Before closing, I should like to say one 
 word upon the practise of composition. I 
 have suffered, by the chance of life, very 
 much from the practise of composition. 
 It has been my lot, I suppose, to read 
 more unpublished work than any one else 
 in this room, and, I hope, in this city. 
 There is an idea, and I venture to think, 
 a very mistaken idea, that you cannot have 
 a taste for literature unless you are your- 
 self an author. I make bold entirely to 
 demur to that proposition. It is practi- 
 cally more mischievous, and leads scores 
 and even hundreds of people to waste their 
 time in the most unprofitable manner that 
 the wit of man can devise, on work in 
 which they can no more achieve even the 
 most moderate excellence than they can 
 compose a Ninth Symphony or paint a 
 Transfiguration. It is a terrible error to 
 suppose that because you relish " Words- 
 worth's solemn-thoughted idyll, or Tenny- 
 son's enchanted reverie," therefore you 
 have a call to run off to write bad verse at 
 the Lake or the Isle of Wight. I beseech 
 you not all to turn to authorship. I will 
 go further. I venture with all respect 
 to those who are teachers of literature, to 
 doubt the excellence and utility of the 
 
OF 
 
 OF LITERATURE. 33 
 
 practise of over-much essay-writing and 
 composition. I have very little faith in 
 rules of style, though I have an unbounded 
 faith in the virtue of cultivating direct and I 
 precise expression. But you must carry ! 
 on the operation inside the mind, and not i 
 merely by practising literary deportment 
 on paper. It is not everybody who can 
 command the mighty rhythm of the great- 
 est masters of human speech. But every * 
 one can make reasonably sure that he] 
 knows what he means, and whether he has! 
 found the right word. These are internal' 
 operations, and are not forwarded by writ- 
 ing for writing's sake. I am strong for at- 1 
 tention to expression, if that attention be I 
 exercised in the right way. It has been 
 said a million times that the foundation of 
 right expression in speech or writing is 
 sincerity. It is as true now as it has ever / 
 been. Right expression is a part of charac- \ 
 ter. As somebody has said, by learning I 
 to speak with precision, you learn to think 
 with correctness; and firm and vigorous 
 speech lies through the cultivation of high j 
 and noble sentiments. I think, as far as 
 my observation has gone, that men will do 
 better for reaching precision by studying 
 carefully and with an open mind and a vigi- 
 lant eye the great models of writing, than 
 by excessive practise of writing on their 
 own account. 
 
34 ON THE STUDY 
 
 Much might here be said on what is one 
 of the most important of all the sides of 
 literary study. I mean its effect as help- 
 ing to preserve the dignity and the purity 
 [ of the English language. That noble in- 
 strument has never been exposed to such 
 dangers as those which beset it to-day. 
 Domestic slang, scientific slang, pseudo- 
 aesthetic affectations, hideous importations 
 from American newspapers, all bear down 
 with horrible force upon the glorious fabric 
 which the genius of our race has reared. 
 I will say nothing of my own on this press- 
 ing theme, but will read to you a passage 
 of weight and authority from the greatest 
 master of mighty and beautiful speech. 
 
 "Whoever in a state," said Milton, "knows how wisely to form 
 the manners of men and to rule them at home and in war with ex- 
 cellent institutes, him in the first place, above others, I should 
 esteem worthy of all honor. But next to him the man who strives 
 to establish in maxims and rules the method and habit of speaking 
 and writing received from a good age of the nation, and, as it were, 
 to fortify the same round with a kind of wall, the daring to over- 
 leap which let a law only short of that of Romulus be used to pre- 
 vent. . . . The one, as I believe, supplies noble courage and 
 intrepid counsels against an enemy invading the territory. The 
 other takes to himself the task of extirpating and defeating, by 
 means of a learned detective police of ears, and a light band of good 
 authors, that barbarism which makes large inroads upon the minds 
 of men, and is a destructive intestine enemy of genius. Nor is it 
 to be considered of small consequence what language, pure or cor- 
 rupt, a people has, or what is their customary degree of propriety in 
 speaking it. ... For, let the words of a country be in part un- 
 handsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear and 
 wrongly uttered, and what do they declare, but, by no light indica- 
 tion, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly-yawn- 
 ing race, with minds already long prepared for any amount of ser- 
 
OF LITERATURE. 35 
 
 vility ? On the other hand, we have never heard that any empire, 
 any state, did not at least flourish in a middling degree as long as its 
 own liking and care for its language lasted." * 
 
 The probabilities are that we are now 
 coming to an epoch, as it seems to me, 
 of a quieter style. There have been 
 one of them, I am happy to think, still 
 survives in our generation three great 
 giants of prose writing. There was, first 
 of all, Carlyle, there was Macaulay, and 
 there is Mr. Ruskin. 2 These are all giants, 
 and they have the rights of giants. But 
 I do not believe that a greater misfortune 
 can befall the students who attend classes 
 here, than that they should strive to write 
 like any one of these three illustrious men. 
 I think it is the worst thing that can hap- 
 pen to them. They can never attain to it. 
 It is not everybody who can bend the bow , 
 of Ulysses, and most men only do them- \ 
 selves a mischief by trying to bend it. * 
 We are now on our way to a quieter style. 
 I am not sorry for it. Truth is quiet. 
 Milton's praise ever lingers in our minds 
 as one of imperishable beauty, where he 
 regrets that he is drawn by I know not 
 what, from beholding the bright counte- 
 nance of truth in the quiet and still air of 
 delightful studies. Moderation and judg- 
 
 1 Letter to Bonmattei, from Florence, 1638,. 
 
 2 The characteristics of the styles of Macaulay and Carlyle are 
 most thoroughly discussed in Minto's " Manual of English Prose 
 Literature." 
 
36 ON THE STUDY 
 
 (ment are more than the flash and the glit- 
 ter even of the greatest genius. I hope 
 that your professors of rhetoric will teach 
 you to cultivate that golden art the 
 steadfast use of a language in which truth 
 can be told; a speech that is strong by 
 natural force, and not merely effective by 
 declamation; an utterance without trick, 
 without affectation, without mannerisms, 
 and without any of that excessive ambi- 
 tion which overleaps itself as much in prose 
 writing as it does in other things. 
 
 Now, ladies and gentlemen, I will detain 
 you no longer. I hope that I have made 
 it clear that we conceive the end of educa- 
 tion on its literary side to be to make a man 
 and not a cyclopaedia, to make a citizen 
 and not a book of elegant extracts. Litera- 
 ture does not end with knowledge of forms, 
 with inventories of books and authors, with 
 rinding the key of rhythm, with the vary- 
 ing measure of the stanza, or the changes 
 from the involved and sonorous periods of 
 the 1 7th century down to the staccato of 
 the iQth century, or all the rest of the 
 technicalities of scholarship. Do not think 
 I contemn these. They are all good things 
 to know, but they are not ends in them- 
 selves. The intelligent man, says Plato, 
 will prize those studies which result in his 
 soul getting soberness, righteousness, and 
 wisdom, and he will less value the others. 
 
OF LITERATURE. 3J 
 
 Literature is one of the instruments, and 
 one of the most powerful instruments, for 
 forming character, for giving us men and 
 women armed with reason, braced by 
 knowledge, clothed with steadfastness and 
 courage, and inspired by that public spirit 
 and public virtue of which it has been well 
 said that they are the brightest ornaments 
 of the mind of man. Bacon is right, as 
 he generally is, when he bids us read not 
 to contradict and refute, nor to believe and 
 take for granted, nor to find talk and dis- 
 course, but to weigh and to consider. Yes, 
 let us read to weigh and to consider. In 
 the times before us that promise or threaten 
 deep political, economical, and social con- 
 troversy, what we need to do is to induce 
 our people to weigh and consider. We 
 want them to cultivate energy without im- 
 patience, activity without restlessness, in- 
 flexibility without ill-humor. I am not 
 going to preach to you any artificial stoic- 
 ism. I am not going to preach to you any 
 indifference to money, or to the pleasures 
 of social intercourse, or to the esteem and 
 good-will of our neighbors, or to any othe* 
 of the consolations and the necessities of 
 life. But, after all, the thing that matters, 
 most, both for happiness and for duty, is 
 that we should habitually live with wtee 
 thoughts and right feelings. Literaturl 
 helps us more than other studies to this most 
 
35 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 blessed companionship of wise thoughts 
 and right feelings, and so I have taken this 
 opportunity of earnestly commending it to 
 your interest and care. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION MOVEMENT. 
 
 The purpose of the University Extension 
 Scheme is to provide the means of higher edu- 
 cation for persons of all classes, and of both 
 sexes engaged in the regular occupations of 
 life. It is in fact an attempt to solve the 
 problem of how much of what the Universities 
 do for their own students can be done for per- 
 sons unable to go to a University. The fund- 
 amental idea throughout has been education 
 for busy people. 
 
 It originated with the University of Cam- 
 bridge. Subsequently, three or four years 
 later, the " London Society for the Extension 
 of University Teaching," was formed to carry 
 on the work within the limits of the Metrop- 
 olis, and a similar scheme was undertaken by 
 Oxford. In addition to this the University of 
 Durham is associated with Cambridge in this 
 work in Northumberland and Durham, while in 
 a tentative and informal way courses of lectures 
 on the University Extension plan have been 
 given during last year in connection with Owen's 
 College, Manchester, and the Victoria Univer- 
 
40 APPENDIX. 
 
 sity. Proposals are now being considered to 
 form an inter-university extension scheme in 
 Scotland in connection with all the Scottish 
 Universities on the same line as the Cambridge 
 scheme. 
 
 In the appended table statistics are given as 
 to the work. The centres (including large 
 towns, small towns, and even villages like the 
 colliery villages in Northumberland) are asso- 
 ciated into groups of three or four, and a lec- 
 turer is appointed to each group who lives in 
 the district for the term, and gives a lecture a 
 week at each of the centres under his charge. 
 It is only by such co-operation of centres that 
 sufficient work is secured to provide adequate 
 remuneration for lecturers. 
 
 One of the chief characteristics of the sys- 
 tem is the method of teaching adopted in con- 
 nection with it. It has been concisely described 
 as follows by a student who had attended the 
 lectures for several terms : " Any town or vil- 
 lage which is prepared to provide an audience, 
 and pay the necessary fees, can secure a course 
 of twelve lectures on any subject taught in the 
 University, by a lecturer who has been edu- 
 cated at the University, and who is specially 
 fitted for lecturing work. A syllabus of the 
 course is printed and put into the hands of 
 students. This syllabus is a great help to per- 
 sons not accustomed to note-taking. Questions 
 are given on each lecture, and written answers 
 can be sent in by any one, irrespective of age 
 or sex. All the lectures, except the first, are 
 preceded by a class, which lasts about an hour. 
 
APPENDIX. 41 
 
 In this class the students and the lecturer talk 
 over the previous lecture. The written answers 
 are returned with such corrections as the lec- 
 turer deems necessary. At the end of the 
 course an examination is held, and certificates 
 are awarded to the successful candidates. 
 These lectures are called University Extension 
 Lectures." 
 
 There can be no question that a great awak- 
 ening of the intellectual life of the working 
 classes is taking place, which has been much 
 assisted and fostered in the north of England 
 by the University Extension Scheme. The 
 proofs of this mental awakening are abundant 
 and unmistakable. The Northumberland min- 
 ers have for several years, under great diffi- 
 culties, obtained courses of University lectures 
 on Political Economy, History, Mining, Geol- 
 ogy, and other subjects. These courses have 
 been given at twelve mining centres. The ag- 
 gregate attendance in one session was about 
 1,400, which means one in seventeen of the 
 entire population. Many of the students 
 walked miles along bad roads, after dark and 
 in all sorts of weather, in order to attend the 
 lectures, and some of them made pecuniary 
 sacrifices in order to secure these educational 
 advantages. Although mention is made here 
 of the artisan class, the majority of the students 
 who have attended the lectures have been busy 
 people of the middle classes, especially trades- 
 people, clerks and teachers in schools. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 TABLE 
 
 Showing the present position of the University Extension Move- 
 ment in England, the figures being for one year and taken 
 from the last published Reports. 
 
 
 No. 
 
 No. 
 
 Tot. No. 
 
 No.Lec- 
 
 Am't paid 
 
 
 Cen- 
 
 Cour- 
 
 Lectures 
 
 turers 
 
 to Lecturers 
 
 
 tres. 
 
 ses. 
 
 given. 
 
 empl'ed. 
 
 in 1885-86. 
 
 iCambridge . . . 
 Oxford 
 
 47 
 
 22 
 
 80 
 2Q 
 
 944 
 
 19 
 j-i 
 
 2804 42 
 528 126 
 
 London Society 
 
 
 
 J 75 
 
 *5 
 
 
 for the Extens'n 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 of University 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Teaching .... 
 In informal con- 
 
 31 
 
 60 
 
 696 
 
 25 
 
 1690 95 
 
 nection with 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Owen's College 
 and the Victoria 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 University . . . 
 
 5 
 
 6 
 
 $ 
 
 4 
 
 150 oo 
 
 
 i5 
 
 175 
 
 1863 
 
 61 
 
 5*73 6 i 
 
 *The University of Durham is associated with Cambridge in the 
 work in Northumberland and Durham. 
 
 The Cambridge and Oxford figures are for 
 the year ending June, 1886, and are consid- 
 erably larger for the session of 1886-87, 
 
 
HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 THE INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER TO 
 
 THE 
 
 BY HENRY J. NICOLL 
 
 AUTHOR OF "GREAT MOVEMENTS." 
 
 The time which most people are able to 
 devote to literature proper is very limited ; 
 and if second or third rate authors are 
 read by them, the result must inevitably 
 be that first-rate authors will be neglected. 
 "Always in books keep the best company," 
 wrote Sidney Smith to his son with his 
 usual good sense. "Don't read a line of 
 Ovid till you have mastered Virgil, nor a 
 line of Thomson till you have exhausted 
 Pope, nor of Massinger till you are familiar 
 with Shakespeare." It is very obvious that 
 those who read Pollok's " Course of Time " 
 while remaining ignorant of Milton's " Para- 
 dise Lost," or the writings of "A. K. H. 
 B.," while neglecting Bacon's "Essays" 
 and Addison's Spectator, are guilty of a 
 lamentable waste of time and misexpendi- 
 ture of energy. " If you should transfer 
 the amount of your reading day by day," 
 
44 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 says Emerson, "from the newspapers to 
 the standard authors but who dare speak 
 of such a thing?" To expect people to 
 give up newspaper-reading is certainly a 
 very Utopian speculation, nor indeed, is it 
 desirable in many respects that they should 
 give it up. But it is a very easy and practi- 
 cal thing to obey the rule to study the best 
 authors first, for it may be safely laid down 
 as a general principle that the greatest 
 works of our literature are also the most 
 attractive. No dramatist is so readable as 
 Shakespeare; to no works of fiction can 
 we return again and again with greater 
 pleasure than to the masterpieces of Field- 
 ing and Scott ; nowhere can the blood- 
 stained story of the French Revolution be 
 followed with keener interest than in the 
 pages of Carlyle. 
 
 Literature is a word often so loosely 
 applied, that it may be well at the outset 
 to define exactly what we mean by it. By 
 people in general it is used with a very 
 wide range of meaning. Milton's " Para- 
 dise Lost " and Buchan's " Domestic Medi- 
 cine;" Rhymer's "Foedera" and Macau- 
 lay's " History of England," are ranked 
 under the same all-embracing name. But 
 literature rightly so termed is a word of 
 much narrower signification. To entitle 
 anything to be classed as literature, it must 
 be so written that, apart from the mean- 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 45 
 
 ing conveyed, its mere style shall be such 
 as to give pleasure. Neither wealth of in- 
 formation nor depth of thought gives a 
 work a right to be called literature unless 
 the information and the thought be attrac- 
 tively expressed. From this it is clear 
 that many books, otherwise of great merit, 
 have no claim to consideration in a literary 
 history. A plan of a country may have 
 more practical utility than the most beauti- 
 ful landscape ever painted, but as it lacks 
 the essential element of beauty, it will not 
 be placed in the same category. In like 
 manner many books which we could very 
 ill afford to dispense with, being destitute 
 of attractiveness and distinction of style, 
 have no value viewed merely as literature. 
 The true literary man is an artist, using 
 his words and phrases with the same felicity 
 and care as a painter uses his colors ; andj 
 whoever aspires to win literary fame 
 pay the closest attention not only to whc 
 he says, but to how he says it. 
 
 De Quincey, whose speculations on such 
 subjects are always ingenious and worth 
 attending to, if sometimes over-refined and 
 far-fetched, in one of his essays 1 lays down 
 a distinction, first suggested by Words- 
 worth, which bears upon what we have 
 been saying. As De Quincey's critical 
 
 1 Originally published in North British Review for August, 1848, 
 article on Pope. 
 
46 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 writings are not so generally read as they 
 should be, we may quote part of his remarks, 
 " In that great social organ, which colleo 
 tively we call literature, there may be dis- 
 tinguished two separate offices, that may 
 blend, and often do so, but capable severally 
 of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted 
 for reciprocal repulsion. There is first the 
 literature of knowledge, and secondly the 
 literature of power. The function of the 
 first is to teach, ; the function of the second 
 is to move. The first is a rudder, the 
 second an oar or a sail. The first speaks 
 to the mere discursive understanding ; the 
 second speaks ultimately, it may happen, 
 to the higher understanding or reason, but 
 always through affections of pleasures or 
 sympathy. . . . What do you learn from 
 Paradise Lost ? ' Nothing at all. What 
 do you learn from a cookery-book ? Some- 
 thing new, something that you did not 
 know before, in every paragraph. But 
 would you therefore put the wretched 
 cookery-book on a higher level of estima- 
 tion than the divine poem ? What you 
 owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of 
 which a million separate items are still but 
 a million of advancing steps on the same 
 earthly level ; what you owe is power t that 
 is, exercise and expansion to your own 
 latent capacity of sympathy with the infi- 
 nite, when every pulse and each separate 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 47 
 
 influx is a step upwards a step ascending 
 as from a Jacob's ladder from earth to 
 mysterious altitudes above the earth. . . . 
 All the literature of knowledge builds only 
 ground fiests, that are swept away by floods, 
 or confounded by the plough ; but the 
 literature of power builds nests in aerial 
 altitudes of temples sacred from violation, 
 or of forests inaccessible to fraud. This 
 is a great perogative of \hzpower of litera- 
 ture ; and it is a greater which lies in the 
 mode of its influence. The knowledge of 
 literature, like the fashion of this world, 
 passeth away. An Encyclopaedia is its 
 abstract ; and, in this respect, it may be 
 taken for its speaking symbol, that before 
 one generation has passed, an Encyclopae- 
 dia is superannuated, for it speaks through 
 the dead memory and unimpassioned under- 
 standing, which have not the rest of higher 
 faculties, but are continually enlarging and 
 varying their phylacteries." 
 
 In the preceding extracts, as will be seen, 
 De Quincey uses the phrase " literature of 
 knowledge" to express that class of writ- 
 ings to which the term literature cannot, 
 as he himself afterwards says, be with 
 propriety applied writings the sole aim 
 of which is to convey information without 
 any effort after beauty of style ; and the 
 phrase " literature of power" to express 
 that class of writings fiction and poetry 
 
48 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 of which the object is, not to instruct, 
 but to move the feelings and to give pleas- 
 ure, and of which, therefore, attractiveness 
 of style is an essential characteristic. But, 
 as he himself says in a note, a great propor- 
 tion of books history, biography, travels, 
 miscellaneous essays, etc. belong strictly 
 to neither of these two classes. Macaulay's 
 " History of England " contains a vast 
 amount of information, but it is not its 
 stores of information which have attracted 
 to it millions of readers ; it is the fasci- 
 nating style in which the information is 
 conveyed, making the narrative as pleasing 
 as a novel, and giving some passages a 
 power of exciting the emotions which not 
 many poems possess. And though to in- 
 struct be not the prime function of the 
 novel or the poem, a great fund of instruc- 
 tion as to morals and manners is embodied 
 in almost all good poems and novels. 
 Shakespeare abounds in pithy aphorisms as 
 to the conduct of life, which have become 
 part of the moralist's stock-in-trade ; Scott, 
 in the " Heart of Midlothian" (to give 
 only one example out of many), preaches 
 a very effective homily on the evil conse- 
 quences of giving up inward peace of mind 
 for the sake of outward grandeur ; and such 
 writers as Thackeray and Miss Austen 
 have done much to make people ashamed 
 of angularities and affectations of manner. 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 49 
 
 So that De Quincey's distinction, though 
 true in a wide sense, and very suggestive 
 in many ways, is not to be accepted as 
 absolutely correct. All literature worthy 
 of the name is "literature of power," but 
 it may be, and very often is, " literature of 
 knowledge" also. 
 
 Having defined what literature is, wei 
 now proceed to consider the way in which 
 its study may be most profitably pursued. 
 In order fully to comprehend any author's 
 work, and to place him in his true position 
 among his fellows, not only must his writ- 
 ings be studied with due care, but he must 
 pay regard to his outward "environment" 
 and to the circumstances of the times in 
 which he lived. Sainte Beuve, the prince 
 of French critics, in all his inquiries made 
 it a rule before studying the author to study 
 the man, thinking that " as the tree is so 
 will be the fruit." He was of opinion 
 " that so long as you have not asked your- 
 self a certain number of questions and 
 answered them satisfactorily if only for 
 your own private benefit and sotto voce 
 you cannot be sure of thoroughly under- 
 standing your model, and that even though 
 these questions may seem to be quite 
 foreign to the nature of his writings. For 
 instance, what were his religious views ? 
 how did the sight of nature affect him ? 
 what was he in his dealings with women 
 
5O HINTS ON THE STDUY OF 
 
 and in his feelings respecting money? 
 was he rich, was he poor ? what was his 
 regimen ? what was his daily manner of 
 life ? etc. Finally, to what vice was he 
 addicted or to what weakness subject ? 
 for no man is entirely free from such. 
 There is not one of the answers to these 
 questions that is without its value in judg- 
 ing the author of a book, or even the book 
 itself, if it be not a treatise on pure mathe- 
 matics, but a literary work into the com- 
 position of which some of the writer's 
 whole nature has perforce entered." The 
 practise which now prevails of publishing 
 full and authentic memoirs of celebrities, 
 if perhaps not unobjectionable in some re- 
 spects, is certainly an incalculable gain to 
 the fruitful and intelligent study of litera- 
 ture. If we were so fortunate as to find a 
 Life of Shakespeare similar to that which 
 Boswell wrote of Dr. Johnson, can any one 
 doubt that it would throw, an immense 
 light upon the many literary puzzles which 
 are to be found in his writings, and which 
 have perplexed generations of commen- 
 tators and evoked hundreds of volumes ? 
 How many ingenious and elaborate studies 
 on " Hamlet " would be shown to be as the 
 baseless fabric of a vision? how many 
 passages which verbal critics have (as they 
 thought) proved to demonstration not to 
 have come from Shakespeare's pen would 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 5 I 
 
 be claimed as his ? how, perchance, every 
 one* of the theories about the Sonnets 
 would crumble into dust, never again to 
 be mentioned but with laughter after their 
 mystery had been unveiled by unimpeach- 
 able evidence ? 
 
 Again, to take a case from our own time, 
 how would we explain the gloomy pessim- 
 ism of the latter writings of Carlyle as con- 
 trasted with the sanguine optimism of 
 Macaulay if no records of his life were to 
 be found, and we were compelled to judge 
 of him by his works alone ? Carlyle's tem- 
 perament, no doubt, was naturally gloomy, 
 but that fact alone would not be a sufficient 
 solution of the enigma. But when we 
 study the story of his life, and learn how 
 he was constantly tormented by ill-health ; 
 how, eagerly ambitious of literary fame, 
 he had to toil on for many a long year un- 
 noticed and unknown, with bitter experi- 
 ence of that deferred hope which makes the 
 heart sick ; how, when the day of triumph 
 came, it came so late that the flower of 
 success had well-nigh lost its fragrance 
 then we have no difficulty in understanding 
 the cause of his frequently dark and harsh 
 views of human character and destiny. 
 We need hardly dwell on the additional 
 interest given to a book by a knowledge of 
 the circumstances under which it was com- 
 posed. Byron's poetry owes half its attrac- 
 
52 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 tiveness to the fascination exercised by his 
 singular and strongly marked personality. 
 Johnson's works, excellent though some 
 of them are, would now, we imagine, be 
 very little read if Boswell's Life of him 
 had not made him one of the best known, 
 and (with all his eccentricities) one of the 
 best-loved characters in our literary his- 
 tory. One's interest even in such a book 
 as Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" is per- 
 ceptibly quickened by the full and curious 
 portrait of himself which he has drawn in 
 his Autobiography. 
 
 But for the thorough and profitable study 
 of an author, it is not enough that we know 
 the circumstances of his private history; 
 we must also make ourselves acquainted 
 with the period in which his lot was cast. 
 No writer, however great and original his 
 genius, can escape the influence of the 
 spirit of the age in which he lives ; whether 
 with or without his consent, his way of 
 looking at things will be modified by the 
 intellectual atmosphere by which he is sur- 
 rounded. Literary men alike influence 
 and are influenced by their time ; and as 
 no history of a country can be considered 
 complete which ignores the influence ex- 
 erted by its literature, so any literary his- 
 tory which ignores the currents of thought 
 and opinion set afloat by political move- 
 ments must necessarily be partial and 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 53 
 
 inadequate. There is no greater desider- 
 atum in our literature at present than a 
 complete and able account of the history 
 of English literature, in which the con- 
 nection between the literary and political 
 history of our country shall be fully dealt 
 with ; and it is very much to be desired 
 that some one of 'sufficient talents and 
 acquirements may be induced to under- 
 take the task. He will have compara- 
 tively unbeaten ground to deal with. M. 
 Taine, indeed, in his " History of English 
 Literature," has done something in this 
 direction ; but his erratic brilliancy is not 
 to be implicity relied upon. 1 In periods 
 of great national emotion, the influence ex- 
 erted on literature by the powerful currents 
 of thought and action sweeping on around 
 it is so strong and so manifest that it can- 
 not escape the notice of the most careless 
 observer. The mighty burst of song in 
 England during the reign of Elizabeth, a 
 time of great men and great deeds, when 
 new ideas and new influences were power- 
 fully at work among all sections of society, 
 has often been commented on. The im- 
 purity and heartlessness of the drama of 
 
 1 NOTE BY AUTHOR. It is not to the credit of England that the 
 only full survey of its literature possessing any high merit from a 
 purely literary point of view should be the work of a Frenchman. 
 We have among us not a few writers, any one of whom, if they 
 would abandon for a few years the practice, now unhappily too 
 prevalent, of writing merely Review articles and brief monographs, 
 could produce a work on the subject worthy of so great a theme. 
 
54 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 the Restoration was a true type of the 
 nation's wild outburst of revelry after its 
 escape from the austere chains of Puritan- 
 ism. Not so strikingly apparent, yet very 
 noticeable, is the connection between the 
 tortuous and shifty politics of the early 
 years of the eighteenth century and the 
 absence from the literature of that period 
 of any high ideal or elevating principle. 
 Coming nearer our own time, all are aware 
 that the revolutionary movement of the 
 close of the last century was active not 
 only in politics but in letters ; that as old 
 laws and old principles were found inade- 
 quate to the needs of the time, so the 
 literary forms and rules of the preceding 
 generation were cast to the winds as quite 
 incapable of expressing the novel ideas and 
 imaginations of a race of writers who pos- 
 sessed little or nothing in common with 
 their predecessors. But even in quieter 
 times, when the broad river of national 
 life is unruffled by violent storms, careful 
 inquiry will make it apparent that its in- 
 fluence upon literature is very close and 
 very real. 
 
 The most useful commentary on a great 
 writer is to be found in the works of his 
 contemporaries. It is mainly the service 
 which they render in this direction that 
 prevents one from agreeing with Emerson 
 when he says that perhaps the human 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 55 
 
 mind would be a gainer if all secondary 
 writers were lost. From an author's con- 
 temporaries we may learn what ideas in 
 his time were, to use Dr. Newman's 
 phrase, " in the air," and thus be able to 
 gauge with some degree of accuracy the 
 extent of his originality. We have all 
 been taught that Shakespeare far outshone 
 any of the brilliant constellations of dra- 
 matic stars which adorned the reign of 
 Elizabeth ; but this is only a barren phrase 
 to us till we have studied the other dra- 
 matists of his time, and are thus in a 
 position to realise what it really means. 
 The writings of contemporaries, moreover, 
 often help us to account for the flaws and 
 deficiencies which not unfrequently occur 
 even in authors of the highest class, by 
 giving us a clue to the literary fashions 
 which prevailed in their time. Shake- 
 speare's tendency to indulge in puns and 
 verbal quibbles, which mars some of his 
 finest passages, was, no doubt, due not so 
 much to any natural inclination as because 
 he lived in an age extravagantly fond of 
 such ingenuities ; and even he, immeasur- 
 ably great man as he was, proved unable 
 to resist the contagion which spread every- 
 where around him. In this connection we 
 should not omit to notice the valuable aid 
 which writers destitute of original power, 
 but with a faculty for assimilating the 
 
56 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 ideas and imitating the style of others, 
 often afford to the study of those whose 
 voices they echo. Every great writer, 
 while his popularity is at its height, is sur- 
 rounded by a crowd of imitators, who copy 
 in an exaggerated fashion his peculiar 
 mannerism, and thus afford a very ready 
 means of observing the minute traits of its 
 style, and its little weaknesses and affecta- 
 tions, which might otherwise escape our 
 notice. If imitation be the sincerest form 
 of flattery, it is often also the bitterest 
 satire. The severest critics of Mr. Tenny- 
 son and Mr. Swinburne have not so ac- 
 curately shown the imperfections in the 
 work of these writers, nor have they, it is 
 probable, caused them so much pain as the 
 verses of certain minor singers of our day 
 have done. No parody is at once so 
 scathing and so ridiculous as an attempt 
 made by a writer of feeble powers to emu- 
 late the productions of a man of genius. 
 
 If ten men of literary culture were 
 asked to write down the names of the 
 thirty English writers (exclusive of authors 
 of our own time) who are their greatest 
 favorites, of whom they make as it were 
 companions and friends, the lists, we may 
 be sure, would differ widely. But if these 
 ten men were asked to write down the names 
 of the thirty English writers who occupy 
 the highest rank, who are accepted as the 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. $? 
 
 best representatives of our literature, the 
 lists would probably resemble each other 
 very closely. In the former case, single 
 lists would contain names which were found 
 in none of the others ; in the latter case, 
 it is very unlikely that any list would con- 
 tain a name which was not also mentioned 
 in several. "If I were confined to a score 
 of English books," said Southey, "Sir 
 Thomas Browne would, I think, be one of 
 them ; nay, probably it would be one if the 
 selection were cut down to twelve. My 
 library, if reduced to these bounds, would 
 consist of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, 
 and Milton ; Jackson, Jeremy Taylor, and 
 South; Isaac Walton, Sidney's "Arcadia," 
 Fuller's " Church History," and Sir Thomas 
 Browne ; l " and what a wealthy and well- 
 stored mind would that man have, what an 
 inexhaustible reservoir, what a Bank of Eng- 
 land to draw upon for profitable thoughts 
 and delightful associations, who should have 
 fed upon them." Some of the names in 
 the above list will strike the reader as curi- 
 ous. Jackson, South, and even Fuller's 
 "Church History" and Sydney's "Arca- 
 dia " are not books which can be ranked 
 among general favorites. But Southey 
 found in them the mental food best adapt- 
 ed to his constitution, and therefore pre- 
 
 1 Doubtless from inadvertence, Southey mentions only eleven wri. 
 ters. Who the twelfth was, affords matter for curious speculation. . / 
 
58 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 f erred them to others of greater intrinsic 
 merit and much wider popularity. In books, 
 as in other things, tastes differ very much. 
 Not a few, whether they are honest enough 
 to confess it or not, agree with worthy 
 George III. in thinking that Shakespeare 
 often wrote "sad stuff;" some people, by 
 no means deficient in abilities, can read 
 " Pickwick " without a laugh or even a 
 smile; Macaulay, Mr. Trevelyan tells us, 
 was so disgusted with the unconventional 
 style of Ruskin and Carlyle that he refused 
 even to look at their works. 
 
 It is, therefore, not at all surprising that 
 when a young reader takes up a book which, 
 he has heard, is enrolled in the list of Eng- 
 lish classics, he should not unfrequently 
 find little in it to please him, and thus be 
 tempted to think that it has been overrated. 
 But if, as in the case we suppose, the book 
 is one which has stood the test of time, he 
 may be sure he is wrong. " Nature," writes 
 Emerson "is much our friend in this matter. 
 Nature is always clarifying her water and 
 her wine ; no filtration can be so perfect. 
 She does the same thing by books as by her 
 gases and plants. There is always a selec- 
 tion in writers, and then a selection from 
 the selection. In the first place, all books 
 that get fairly into the open air of the world 
 were written by the successful class, by the 
 affirming and advancing class, who utter 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 59 
 
 what tens of thousands feel though they 
 cannot say. There has already been a 
 scrutiny and choice from many hundreds 
 of young pens before the pamphlet or polit- 
 ical chapter which you read in a fugitive 
 journal comes to your eye. All these are 
 young adventurers, who produce their per- 
 formances to the wise ear of Time, who sits 
 and weighs, and ten years hence out of a 
 million of pages reprints one. Again it is 
 judged, it is winnowed by all the winds of 
 opinion and what terrific selection has 
 not passed on it before it can be reprinted 
 after twenty years and reprinted after a 
 century ! It is as if Minos and Rhadaman, 
 thus had indorsed the writing. 'Tis there- 
 fore an economy of time to read old and 
 famed books. Nothing can be preserved 
 which is not good/' We might almost add 
 that whatever has not been preserved is 
 not good. Those whose duty or inclination 
 leads them to wander in literary bypaths 
 sometimes come across forgotten writers 
 in whom they find a certain tone of manner 
 or feeling which gives them, in their eyes, 
 more attractiveness than is possessed by 
 writers whose praises are echoed by thou- 
 sands. But all attempts to resuscitate 
 such books fail as utterly as attempts to 
 lower the position of books which have 
 been accepted as classical. The opinion 
 of the majority of readers during many 
 
6O HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 years is better than that of any individual 
 reader, or any small coterie of readers, how- 
 ever high their gifts or attainments may be. 
 It often happens that wider knowledge 
 and culture leads one who at first was un- 
 able to recognize the merits of a classical 
 author to see his error and acquiesce in 
 the general verdict. In the case of our 
 older authors, there are preliminary diffi- 
 culties of style and language, which must, 
 at the cost of some trouble, be vanquished 
 before they can be read with pleasure. The 
 practice of "dipping into" an author and 
 reading bits here and there is productive 
 of a great deal of literary heterodoxy. It 
 is, for example, a not uncommon remark 
 that articles, of which the writers are 
 never heard of, but which are as good as 
 any in the Spectator or Tatler, appear in 
 our newspapers every day. No doubt 
 there is a very large amount of talent now 
 employed in newspaper-writing ; neverthe- 
 less our average journalists are not Steeles 
 or Addisons. The reason, in most cases, 
 why newspaper articles are thought equal 
 to the Spectator is because the former deal 
 with living subjects, subjects which are 
 interesting people at the moment, while 
 the latter, having been written more than 
 a century and a half ago, has an antique 
 flavor about it. The Spectator cannot be 
 appreciated but by those who, not content 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 6l 
 
 with dipping into it here and there, have 
 read at least a considerable portion of it, 
 and thus gained such a knowledge of the 
 manners and opinions which prevailed when 
 it was written, as to be able to enter into 
 the spirit of the work. A newspaper 
 article referring to matters occupying the 
 minds of all, may be perused with pleasure 
 without any preparation. 
 
 But though increased knowledge and 
 wider culture generally leads one to ac- 
 quiesce in received opinions regarding the 
 value of authors, they do not always do so. 
 Every critic, however large his range and 
 however keen his discernment, occasionally 
 meets in with works of great fame of which 
 he cannot appreciate the merit. He may, 
 indeed, be able to perceive the qualities 
 which cause others to admire them, but 
 they are written in a vein which he cannot 
 bring himself to like : the tone of senti- 
 ment running through them, or the style 
 in which they are written, is repugnant to 
 his nature. The fact that this is so, gener- 
 ally leads-to a plentiful indulgence in what 
 Mr. James Payn has so happily christened 
 "sham admiration in literature." People 
 praise botiks which they have never been 
 able to read, or which they have only 'read 
 at the cost of much labor and weariness, 
 not because they like them themselves, 
 but simply because they have heard others 
 
62 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 praise them. It is melancholly to reflect 
 how much of our current criticism upon 
 classical authors is of this nature, consist- 
 ing of mere windy rhetoric, not of the un- 
 biassed and honest expression of the critic's 
 real opinions. The practice is both an 
 unprofitable and a dishonest one. Much 
 more is to be learned from the genuine 
 opinions of an able man, even though these 
 opinions be erroneous, than from the repeti- 
 tion of conventional critical dicta. John- 
 son's "Lives of the Poets" contain many 
 incorrect critical judgments; but does any 
 one suppose that the work would have 
 been of more value if, instead of relating 
 in manly and straightforward fashion the 
 opinions of his own powerful, if somewhat 
 narrow, understanding, he had merely re 
 peated the " orthodox " criticisms on such 
 writers as Milton and Gray ? Even Jeffrey's 
 articles on Wordsworth those standing ex- 
 amples of blundering criticism are much 
 more useful and interesting to the intelli- 
 gent reader than the thrice-repeated lau- 
 datory criticisms which are now so often 
 uttered by countless insincere devotees 
 of the poet of the Lakes. Every student 
 of literature should make an honest effort 
 to form opinions for himself, and not take 
 up too much with borrowed criticism. 
 Critical essays, books of literary history, 
 books of select extracts, are all very use- 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 63 
 
 ful as aids to the study of great writers, but 
 they ought not, as is too often the case, 
 to be made a substitute for the study of 
 the writers themselves. Infinitely more 
 is to be learned from the reading of " Ham- 
 let," than from the reading of a hundred 
 studies on that drama. If, after having 
 made a fair attempt to peruse some author 
 whose works are in high repute, the reader 
 finds that he is engaged in a field of litera- 
 ture which presents no attraction to him ; 
 that he is studying a writer with whom he 
 has no sympathy, who strikes no respond- 
 ent chord in his own nature ; the best 
 course for him is to abandon the vain at- 
 tempt to like what he does not like, to 
 admire what he really does not admire. 
 Shakespeare's famous lines 
 
 " No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en, 
 In brief, sir, study what you most affect," 
 
 convey thoroughly sound advice, provided, 
 of course, that proper pains be taken to 
 extend one's culture as widely as possible, 
 and that opinions regarding the profitable- 
 ness or unprofitableness of studying cer- 
 tain authors be not formed without due 
 deliberation. In the study of literature, 
 as in other studies, interest advances 
 as knowledge increases ; very frequently 
 books which to the tyro seem "weary, 
 stale, flat, and unprofitable," are those 
 which he afterwards comes to regard as 
 
64 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 among his most cherished intellectual pos- 
 sessions. 
 
 A very attractive and instructive way of 
 studying literature, is to select some great 
 book or some great author as a nucleus 
 round which to group one's knowledge of 
 the writers of a period. If, for example, 
 one studies that universally delightful book, 
 BoswelPs " Life of Johnson," and follows 
 up the clues which its perusal suggests, a 
 very competent knowledge of a large part 
 of the literature of the eighteenth century 
 may be acquired. Boswell's frequent cut- 
 ting allusions to his rival, Sir John Haw- 
 kins, naturally induce us to read that 
 worthy's Life of the "great lexicographer," 
 in which, amid much trash and tedious 
 moralizing, many curious and suggestive 
 details are to be found. In a similar way 
 his obvious dislike of Mrs. Piozzi draws 
 attention to that lively lady's entertain- 
 ing gossip ; while the glimpses he gives of 
 the life and conversation of most of the 
 celebrated writers of the period, such as 
 Burke, Goldsmith, Robertson, Hume, in- 
 spire us with a desire to become acquainted 
 with their writings and with the particu- 
 lars of their lives. Or if Pope be taken 
 as the vantage-ground from which to sur- 
 vey the literary landscape around, how 
 easily and pleasantly are we introduced to 
 the acquaintance, not only of the greater 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 65 
 
 figures of the time, Addison, Swift, Bo- 
 lingbroke, Arbuthnot, and others, but 
 of the smaller fry, the ragged denizens of 
 Grub Street, so mercilessly satirized in 
 the " Dunciad." No one can know Dry- 
 den thoroughly without picking up, almost 
 imperceptibly it may be, an immense fund 
 of information about the many curious 
 literary products of the Restoration ; and 
 few more interesting literary studies could 
 be suggested than, taking Shakespeare as 
 a centre, to mark wherein he differed from 
 his predecessors and contemporaries, how 
 far he availed himself of what they had 
 done, how far he influenced them, and how 
 far he was influenced by them, and to trace 
 the whole course of the Elizabethan drama 
 from its first dim drawings to its melan- 
 choly but not inglorious close. When one 
 has made oneself at home in the literature 
 of any period, so as to be able to conjure 
 up before the mind's eye its more import- 
 ant writers, even its minutest details, which 
 in themselves seem trifling and tedious, 
 acquire an interest and importance, every 
 fresh particular adding a new shade of 
 color to the mental picture we form of the 
 epoch. 
 
 Literary history becomes much more in- 
 teresting to most people the nearer it ap- 
 proaches to our own time ; and very few 
 are likely to acquire a taste for reading 
 
66 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 by having their attention directed mainly 
 to our older authors. Now, what every 
 writer of a book like the present and every 
 teacher of English literature ought to aim 
 at is, to give his readers or his pupils a 
 taste for literature. If the teacher of 
 English literature fails in this, his labors 
 are almost in vain. The amount of knowl- 
 edge which he is able to communicate is 
 comparatively small; but if he manages 
 to impress on his pupils a sense of the 
 greatness and importance of literature, 
 and of the countless benefits and pleasures 
 which may be derived from its study, he 
 has sown the seeds of what will yet pro- 
 duce a very abundant harvest. The re- 
 mark is very often made that young people 
 are of their own accord likely to peruse 
 writers of the day, while leaving the classi- 
 cal writers of former generations neglected. 
 No doubt there is a good deal of truth in 
 this : but I am disposed to question very 
 much whether the practice of using mainly 
 our older writers for educational purposes 
 has any appreciable effects whatever in 
 extending their general perusal ; and when 
 one considers how literature even liter- 
 ature of the day is neglected by num- 
 bers of educated people, one is inclined to 
 have some doubt as to the wisdom of leav- 
 ing recent writers out of the educational 
 curriculum. Few will be disposed to deny 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 6? 
 
 that the most important section of political 
 history is that which relates to recent times. 
 To a large extent, the same is true of litera- 
 ture. Nothing is more likely to quicken 
 one's interest in books, and to serve as an 
 incentive to further research, than an ac- 
 quaintance with the various literary modes 
 that have been prevalent in recent times 
 or which are still in vogue. Moreover, if 
 the study of English literature is pursued 
 partly as a means of acquiring a correct style, 
 there can be no doubt whatever that the 
 prose writers of the last two centuries 
 will prove much more useful guides than 
 their predecessors. The following interest- 
 ing remarks on this subject, quoted from a 
 lecture "On Teaching English," 1 recently 
 delivered by Dr. Alexander Bain before 
 the Birmingham Teachers' Association, 
 appear to me to have much force, though 
 the views expressed are perhaps rather 
 extreme. "Irrespective of a.ny question 
 as to the superiority of Shakespeare and 
 Milton, it must from necessity be the case 
 that the recent classics possess the great- 
 est amount of unexhausted interest. Their 
 authors have studied and been guided by 
 the greatest works of the past, have re- 
 
 1 This lecture with other matter has been incorporated into a re- 
 cent volume by Professor Bain, called "On Teaching English," 
 with detailed examples, and an inquiry into the definition of poetry. 
 This work is auxiliary to the enlarged edition of the author's " Rhet- 
 oric and English Composition." 
 
68 HINTS ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 produced many of their effects, as well as 
 added new strokes of genius ; and thus 
 our reading is naturally directed to them 
 by preference. A canto of ' Childe Har- 
 old' has not the genius of ' Macbeth/ 
 or the second book of * Paradise Lost,' 
 but it has more freshness of interest. 
 This is as regards the reader of mature 
 years, but it must be taken into account 
 in the case of the youthful reader also. 
 
 "So with regard to the older prose. 
 The 'Essays' of Bacon cannot interest 
 this generation in any proportion to the 
 author's transcendent genius. They have 
 passed into subsequent literature until 
 their interest is exhausted, except from 
 the occasional quiet felicity of the phrases. 
 Bacon's maxims on the conduct of busi- 
 ness are completely superseded by Sir 
 Arthur Helps's essay on that subject, sim- 
 ply because Sir Arthur absorbed all that 
 was in Bacon, and augumented it by sub- 
 sequent wisdom and experience. To make 
 Bacon's original a text-book of the pres- 
 ent day, whether for thought or for style, 
 is to abolish the three intervening centu- 
 ries. 
 
 "Of Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical 
 Polity/ another literary monument of the 
 Elizabethan age, while I give it every 
 credit as a work suited to its own time, I 
 am obliged to concur in the judgment of 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 69 
 
 an authority great both in Jurisprudence 
 and in English style the late John Austin 
 who denounced its language as ' fustian.' 
 " So much as regards the decay of in- 
 terest in the old classics. Next as to their 
 use in teaching style or in exercising pupils 
 in the practice of good composition. Here, 
 too, I think, they labor under incurable 
 defects. Their language is not our lan- 
 guage ; their best expressions are valuable 
 as having the stamp of genius, and are 
 quotable to all time, but we cannot work 
 them into the tissue of our own familiar 
 discourse." 
 
71 
 
 THE STUDY OF 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 A LECTURE 
 
 DELIVERED TO THE STUDENTS' ASSOCIATION OF 
 ST. ANDREWS, MARCH 26, 1887 
 
 BY LESLIE STEPHEN 1 
 
 I AM to speak of a well-worn topic, and 
 I begin by saying that I do not propose to 
 dwell upon one of its aspects. I shall not 
 consider the proper place of English litera- 
 ture in our school and university studies. 
 My reason is simply that I have not the 
 practical experience which would enable 
 me to pass beyond the ordinary common- 
 places. I have more prejudices than rea- 
 soned convictions on that subject. I take 
 for granted, indeed, as an undeniable propo- 
 sition, that familiarity with our literature 
 is desirable. It is desirable for us all to 
 have the personal acquaintance of men 
 
 'Leslie Stephen, the well-known English author and lecturer, was 
 born in 1832, and educated at Cambridge. He was editor of 
 the Cornhill Magazine from 1871 to 1882. He is now engaged in 
 editing the " Dictionary of National Biography," a most thorough 
 and comprehensive work in fifty volumes. Mr. Stephen is well- 
 known by his " Hours in a Library" (3 series), " Life of Henry Faw- 
 cett," and several volumes in the " English Men of Letters series." 
 
72 THE STUDY OF 
 
 better, wiser, more highly endowed than 
 ourselves. Acquaintance with such men 
 is not less desirable after their death. In 
 some respects it is even more desirable. 
 The dead man cannot, it is true, answer 
 our questions or thrill us by his bodily 
 presence ; but neither can he alarm our 
 modesty or repel us by accidental infirmi- 
 ties. If we could consciously meet a 
 Shakespeare, we should be struck dumb ; 
 but we are quite at our ease with that 
 essence of Shakespeare which is com- 
 pressed into a book. We can put him in 
 our pockets, admit him to an audience 
 when we are in the humor, and treat him 
 as familiarly as a college chum. We can 
 meet Dr. Johnson without the least fear 
 that he will be personally rude, and stop 
 Macaulay's excessive flow of information 
 by simply shutting up his pages. The man 
 may be only unfortunate who, in his youth, 
 has not been stimulated by the personal 
 acquaintance of some revered contempo- 
 rary. He is more than unfortunate, he is 
 blameworthy, if he do not make the ac- 
 quaintance of some of the great men from 
 Chaucer to Lord Tennyson, from Bacon 
 to Carlyle, who speak to us across the gulf 
 of time or from regions inaccessible to us 
 in person. 
 
 The true object of the study of a man's 
 writings is, according to my definition, to 
 
 ^o-^w*J'"^^ BB * U6 *^** ! *'* I1 ^ 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 73 
 
 make a personal friend of the author. 
 You have not studied him thoroughly tilP\ 
 you know the very trick of his speech, the j 
 turn of his thoughts, the characteristic / 
 peculiarities of his sentiments, of his im- f 
 agery, of his mode of contemplating the / 
 world or human life. You should breathe 
 a familiar atmosphere when you open his/ 
 pages. If you meet a stray phrase of his^ 
 it should ring in your ears with the accent 
 of an old acquaintance; you should be 
 able to swear to it as a part of his coinage. 
 You should "have learnt his great lan- 
 guage, caught his clear accents, made him 
 your pattern to live and to die," and, 1 wil] 
 venture to add, you should then have pass- 
 ed beyond this stage of idolatry which 
 is good as a phase, but bad as a permanent 
 state of mind into that of sane and 
 reasonable appreciation. Addison, in an \ 
 often quoted passage, ridicules the reader 7 
 who wants to know whether his author is j 
 short or tall, black or fair. Perhaps such 
 a demand is excessive ; but I do not feel 
 that I really know an author till I almost 
 fancy that I should recognize him if I met 
 him at a railway station. That indeed 
 proves that I know very few; but it marks 
 what is my own ideal. How, then, to at- 
 tain such knowledge ? I begin by replying, 
 that before reaching the root of the matter 
 there are certain auxiliary studies which 
 
74 THE STUDY OF 
 
 are obviously necessary and yet obviously 
 external. They give the key, they do not 
 lead us into the sanctuary, For example, 
 one necessary preliminary is to learn our 
 letters. But a bare power of reading does 
 not take us very far. That part of our 
 education was probably completed in our 
 nurseries. In our nurseries also we gener- 
 ally suppose ourselves to have learnt the 
 English language. Now it is thought 
 superfluous to insist upon a study of the 
 alphabet, but a good deal is said of the im- 
 portance of that scientific study of lan- 
 guage which acquires the more sounding 
 title, philology. For the study of a for- 
 eign literature it is, of course, indispens- 
 ably necessary to learn the language, and 
 generally at a comparatively late period. 
 
 But for the study of English literature 
 the question occurs whether we may not 
 be presumed to have learnt more from our 
 nurses than we shall ever acquire from 
 our teachers. Philology is, of course, a 
 most important and interesting study. An 
 investigation of the great instrument of 
 thought and of its processes of develop- 
 ment has a genuine interest for philoso- 
 phers, logicians, and even for historians 
 and antiquarians, as well as for literary 
 students. Philologists have to study the 
 same documents as men of letters. They 
 have to read Chaucer and Shakespeare, 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 75 
 
 though with a very different purpose. So 
 a chemist may study a picture as well as 
 an art critic. The main interest of the 
 one is in the pigments to which it owes its 
 color, as the main interest of the other is 
 in the effect upon the imagination of a 
 particular combination of colors. The phil- 
 ologist, as such, can tell you the history 
 of a word used by Shakespeare, but as a 
 philologist he has nothing to do with the 
 imaginative force of the sentence in which 
 the word occurs. So far as the language 
 is obsolete, so far as it has become a dead 
 language, he can do something for you. 
 He can supplement the instruction which, 
 as to the great bulk of the language, was 
 already given in your nursery. Here and 
 there he clears away an obscurity or points 
 some allusion no longer manifest; and we 
 will, if you please, be duly thankful to him, 
 and tell him that he has rendered us a real 
 service. But, however valuable for other 
 purposes, we must admit that he is not a 
 guide to the kind of knowledge which we 
 desire, but an humble attendant who has 
 cleared a few stumbling-blocks from our 
 path. 
 
 There are other studies which make 
 greater claims, and of which I must speak 
 more fully. ^J Literature is made up of~ 
 words. It is a combination of raw ma- 
 terials which are all to be found in the 
 
76 THE STUDY OF 
 
 dictionary. But it is, as we know, a com- 
 bination governed by peculiar laws of its 
 own. To study those laws scientifically 
 must, therefore, it is urged, be an essen- 
 tial aim of the literary student. The his- 
 torical method is now in the ascendant. 
 It affects not only history in the old sense, 
 but philosophy, political and social theory, 
 and every other branch of inquiry which 
 has to do with the development of living 
 beings. No one would assert this more 
 emphatically than I should do. 'One corol- 
 "/lary is that we should study the history of 
 our own literature, that we should not only 
 trace it back to its origin in our own islands, 
 but also to the great foreign literatures 
 which have had so profound an influence 
 upon our own. Especially, it is urged, no 
 one can appreciate English literature with- 
 out a knowledge of classical literature. 
 You cannot, says one authority, fully esti- 
 mate Chaucer unless you are familiar with 
 Virgil, Statius, and Ovid. 
 
 No one, says Mark Pattison, can follow 
 Milton fully unless he has had at least a 
 taste of Milton's training; that is, some 
 knowledge of the authors whom Milton, 
 we may not say plundered, but turned to 
 account in every page of his poetry. The 
 statement is not only plausible, but owes 
 its plausibility to the fact that it contains 
 a most important truth. Undoubtedly the 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 sympathetic study of ancient master-pieces 
 is a most admirable training for the liter- 
 ary student. Really to appropriate the 
 great writers of Greece or Rome is to 
 acquire a valuable possession. It is a great 
 thing to know how the real masters take 
 hold of a subject, in order to feel the vast 
 difference between the great creative gen- 
 ius and the mere man of talent. The great 
 classical works have an advantage not only 
 as being recognized masterpieces, but as 
 being foreign. To know them is to recog- 
 nize genius amongst unfamiliar shapes and 
 surroundings. As an hour in Calais will 
 put more fresh knowledge into your minds 
 than a month in London, simply by mak- 
 ing you realize that there are countries 
 where babies talk French, so excursions 
 into the wide expanse, 
 
 Which deep-browed Homer ruled for his demesne, 
 
 enables you to get rid of insular prejudices. 
 It is a training in the art of recognizing\ 
 the essential quality of genius apart from I 
 the local and temporary accidents which 
 go so far to determine our taste in ordinary 
 cases. I would emphatically assert the 
 advantages of classical study if any one 
 disputed it all the more ungrudgingly, 
 I hope, because my own acquaintance with 
 the classics is limited. But I shall not be 
 therefore deterred from observing that 
 even this study may be so conducted as to 
 
? THE STUDY OF 
 
 degenerate into mere cram. The average 
 schoolboy gains little when he holds Latin 
 to be an instrument of torture invented 
 by some prehistoric Keate or Busby, and 
 is painfully drilled into construing arma, 
 the arms ; virumque, and the man ; cano, 
 I sing. Nay, such men have been ob- 
 served as the more scholarlike pedant who 
 can unravel every crabbed passage in the 
 most corrupt fragment of a Greek play, 
 but has only learnt, like Thackeray's Bar- 
 dolph, to despise everybody who can't put 
 a slang song into Greek iambics or turn a 
 police report into the language of Thucy- 
 dides. 
 
 I have known many classical scholars, 
 of whom I can safely say that they excite 
 my envy, because I can perceive how much 
 their taste in modern has been refined 
 and elevated by their study of ancient 
 literature. But I have also, to be quite 
 frank, known one or two who have only 
 become better trained schoolboys, and 
 have become more finical and pedantic 
 without any perceptible improvement of 
 their powers of appreciating literature. 
 From which I only infer that it is possible 
 even to learn Latin and Greek in a sense 
 in such a sense as to be a formidable 
 competitor in an examination, and yet to 
 gain a very poor training indeed. Such a 
 man acquires something. He has the 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. /9 
 
 power of explaining allusions or produc- 
 ing parallel passages. He can track Mil- 
 ton in his appropriations, or say how many 
 Greek poets have anticipated Gray's re- 
 mark about the rose which wastes its 
 sweetness in the desert air. It is not only 
 amusing but instructive to hunt out the 
 curious coincidences of thought or phrase 
 in great poets, or to see how a great writer 
 mades his own of what he borrows. But 
 the power of answering one of the stock 
 examiners' questions, "explain the allu- 
 sions in this passage," is consistent with/ 
 complete insensibility to the merits of botlj 
 passages. How far does such knowledge 
 really aid your appreciation ? Opening 
 Milton at random, I find that the passage 
 describing Satan, 
 
 His spear, to equal which the tallest pine 
 Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast 
 Of some great ammiral, were but a wand, 
 
 may imply recollections of the " Odyssey," 
 of the " ^Eneid," and of Tasso. The com- 
 mentator is also good enough to tell us 
 that there are many pines in Norway. 
 Does the passage sound any the better or 
 the worse? Pattison told us that only 
 those classically trained could follow Mil- 
 ton. It is only such persons, I fully agree, 
 who catch the full Miltonic aroma. But if 
 I were asked to name some one whose soul 
 would really ring like an echo to the ma- 
 jestic language of the great Puritan, I 
 
8O THE STUDY OF 
 
 think that my mind, and the minds of a 
 good many of us, would spontaneously re- 
 cur to the name of one who has told us 
 that he knows little Latin and no Greek 
 I mean Mr. John Bright. He cannot, 
 he says very frankly, and it is a misfortune 
 for him, appreciate Plato. But that de- 
 fect is clearly compatible with unequalled 
 mastery of some of the noblest strains of 
 English eloquence, and it would be in- 
 credible that a man who can use the in- 
 strument so skilfully should not appreciate 
 its use by others. 
 
 When, indeed, I am told that a knowl- 
 edge of classical literature is not only most 
 desirable, but even essential to a full ap- 
 preciation of the modern literatures, I 
 cannot but think that there is a gap in the 
 logic. How do you learn to appreciate 
 either? I know a lady of remarkable 
 beauty ; I am told and I believe that she 
 inherits the beauty from her grandmother. 
 Do you imagine that I enjoy the sight of 
 her beauty the less because I had not the 
 happiness to know her grandmother? The 
 knowledge of the fact is interesting to me 
 as an humble disciple of Mr Darwin ; it is 
 a case of " heredity," and therefore relev- 
 ant to a scientific inquiry. Similarly, if I 
 wish to explain how English literature 
 comes to have certain peculiarities, I must 
 know the sources from which it is derived. 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 8 1 
 
 But after all there is a vast difference be- 
 tween what is called knowing a thing's 
 history and really knowing the thing it- 
 self, between really having an ear for 
 music and knowing how, for example, 
 modern harmony has grown out of strum- 
 ming on some prehistoric barbarous torn- 
 torn. No amount of such knowledge wilT\ 
 give you the ear ; nor will any knowledge of \ 
 the relations between English and classi-> \ 
 cal literature of itself endow you with the/ 
 true faculty for perceiving the beauties of J 
 either. We cannot honestly deny the fact- 
 that many of our greatest writers owed 
 little or nothing to any classical training, 
 even when they possessed it. It is enough 
 to run over the bare names of Shakes- 
 peare and Bunyan and Defoe and Burns 
 and Dickens, to say nothing of many less 
 distinguished. Cobbett wrote incompar- 
 ably better English than Dr. Parr, and 
 Mr. Bright has a style very superior to ^__ 
 I will not give a name. Criticism requires 
 a wider knowledge though less genius 
 than original authorship; but I cannot 
 discover that our finest critic of some of 
 the most important English literature 
 I mean Charles Lamb owed anything to 
 his scanty scholarship. 
 
 Admitting, then, most heartily the great 
 value of a genuine study of classical t\ 
 literature, I yet am forced to regard it | 
 

 ^ 
 
 THE STUDY OF 
 t 
 
 rather as one of the studies by which our 
 tastes may be improved and our percep- 
 I tions refined than as an indespensable 
 ' mode of training. There is one other 
 kind of study upon which I may spend a 
 word or two. Recent critics, I observe, 
 are fond of dwelling upon what they call 
 the " form " as distinguished from the 
 "content" of poetry, and are given to insist 
 that the important question is not what 
 a man says, but how he says it. I will not 
 diverge into a discussion of this state- 
 ment, which like many others may, as I 
 hold, be true and important, or very much 
 the reverse according to our interpreta- 
 tion of its precise meaning. I will only 
 note that, on one acceptation, it amounts 
 to recommending the most barren and 
 Wechanical study as the only genuine 
 study. /You are, it is sometimes suggested, 
 to study a poet's metres and neglect his 
 meaning. The difference between succes- 
 sive schools of poetry is not in the senti- 
 ments which they express, but in the 
 mechanism by which they contrive to ex- 
 press them. And thus a literary revolu- 
 tion is explained like a revolution in the 
 practical sciences. Somebody invented a 
 new scheme of versification as somebody 
 invented a new application of steam or 
 electricity. To which I shall only say 
 that the metrical systems and so forth 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 83 
 
 which appear in different periods are un- 
 doubtedly worth study, and here, as every- 
 where, so far as the knowledge is use- 
 ful, we should be careful to have accurate 
 knowledge. But it is a palpable mistake, 
 as I think, to speak of such changes as a 
 cause instead of a symptom. If Pope pre- 
 ferred a smooth and monotonous system 
 of verse to the rougher but more varied 
 versification of his predecessors, the fact 
 is to be noted, but not to be assigned as 
 an explanation. The system of Pope was" 
 not due to an invention of ten-syllabled 
 couplets, as the change in weaving was 
 due to Arkwright's invention of the spinn- 
 ing-machine. It came when it was wanted. 
 It was wanted when anew order of thoughts 
 and feelings had to be expressed. The 
 new order of thought and feeling was not 
 created by the new mechanism, but deter- 
 mined its adoption. The literary revolu- 
 tion, to which we give the name of Words- 
 worth or Coleridge, was no more caused 
 by the invention of a new literary fashion 
 than the great political revolution by the 
 abandonment of wigs and laced coats. 
 Wigs and laced coats went with other 
 things of more importance as men's social 
 and political and religious instincts under- 
 went a change ; and the minor change, too, 
 is worth noting as a symptom. But to 
 treat the symptom as the cause, or to sup- 
 
84 THE STUDY OF 
 
 pose that the external changes can be 
 studied to any purpose without reference 
 ^o the underlying causes to which they 
 were due, is to miss the whole significance 
 of literary or any other kind of history^J^ 
 
 And this leads to a further inquiry. 
 
 here are we to look for Jie real signifi- 
 ce of such changes ?<OLiterature may 
 be considered in two waysT~A book is the 
 utterance of an individual mind^ It is the 
 sic cogitavit of a Francis Bacon, a Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare, or an Alexander Pope. 
 But it does not depend simply upon the 
 individual mind. /Every individual is a 
 constituent part of a society. He trans- 
 mutes as well as creates. He utters his 
 own thoughts, but he is also the organ 
 through which the spirit of the, age utters 
 its thoughts.^ He looks upon the world, 
 but he is a13o, in part at least, a product 
 of its development. His philosophy, the 
 enthusiasms which stir him, the doubts 
 which torment him, the answers which he 
 supplies to them, the form in which he 
 states the eternal problems and tries to 
 utter a solution, are all in great measure 
 determined for him by the social element 
 in which he lives. This has become a 
 commonplace. No one would now think 
 that Shakespeare could be criticised fully 
 without some knowledge of Elizabeth's 
 time, or Pope without a knowledge of 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 85 
 
 Annie's time, or Byron without a knowl- 
 edge of the Revolutionary time. Litera- 
 ture in this aspect is simply one function 
 of the social organism if you will allow 
 me to use the philosophical slang of the 
 day and any serious treatment of it 
 must recognize the fact. The greatest- 
 men, it is true, say what is of interest for 
 all times ; but even the very greatest, the 
 Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, say- 
 it in the dialect and under all the condi- 
 tions of their own time. *-+. 
 So far then as the study of literature n 
 can be I will not say made truly scien- K 
 tine, for it is idle to speak of science in re- 
 lation to the vague and tentative judg- ') 
 ments which alone are possible now, but j| 
 treated in a scientific spirit, that is, 
 examined impartially and placed in due 
 correlation with all the truths known to us, 
 it is essential to understand in some de- I 
 gree the time as well as the man, because I \ 
 only through the time can we fully under- 1 
 stand the man. In this sense the special I 
 studies which I have mentioned are all in 
 various degrees relevant ; they are useful 
 auxiliary studies: the study V the Iftn- 
 guage. "jjjig f" r g of gvprgggjn^, of the 
 previous literatures which have influenced 
 our own, all call attention either to the 
 symptoms or to the~ causes, of Important 
 facts which we have^ta take into account. , 
 
86 THE STUDY OF 
 
 But I think that we can see the import- 
 ance of another kind of study still more 
 intimately connected with our aims. Let 
 me try to show how, as I conceive, it may 
 be of real assistance, even at the price of 
 repeating some very familiar truths. You 
 should, I say, understand the spirit of the 
 age, and by that I do not mean that you 
 should study what is called the philosophy 
 of history. There is, indeed, no more 
 fascinating study; but, in the first place, 
 the doctrines which it announces are still 
 the guesses of clever men rather than the 
 established conclusions of scientific ob- 
 servers ; and, in the next place, true or 
 false, they are abstract theories, not con- 
 crete pictures. What you require is not 
 a clever analysis, but a vivid representation 
 of the period. You should see it, not be 
 full of formula about it. An architect 
 upon glancing at an old building can tell 
 you to what century or to what generation 
 it belongs. When you turn over a book 
 you should possess the instinct which en- 
 ables you to give a shrewd guess as to 
 whether, for example, it was written be- 
 fore or after 1760, in the days of George 
 II. or of George III. 
 
 If, now, you were studying the period 
 of which Dry den was the literary auto- 
 crat, I believe that few bits of reading 
 would give you more real help than that 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 8/ 
 
 admirable third chapter of Macaulay's \ 
 history which with all its faults, gives the ! 
 most graphic and picturesque account of I 
 English society at the time. Or, if you } 
 go to contemporary documents, nothing 
 would enable you to construct such a 
 picture for yourself as the diaries of Pepys 
 or the memoirs of Grammont ; or, if I may 
 mention a favorite book of my own, the 
 volumes of the State trials which deal 
 with that period. Nothing enables you to 
 see so clearly the various heterogeneous 
 elements of which society was then com- 
 posed, and to understand what was the 
 audience whose tastes Dryden considered 
 in every line that he wrote, the great 
 seminal thoughts which were then ferment- 
 ing and struggling for utterance, and the 
 imagery which typified them most com- 
 pletely, as the documents which bring be- 
 fore you the men themselves, with all their 
 hopes and fears and beliefs and doubts 
 and passions. If English literature is> 
 more intelligible when read in conjunction 
 with the classics, I certainly hold that our 
 understanding is still more improved by 
 reading it in conjunction with English 
 history. To explain myself more clearly,-" 
 let me take a particular instance. Sup- 
 pose, for example, that you wish to study 
 Pope, who, of course represents a most 
 important moment in the development of 
 
88 THE STUDY OF 
 
 English literature. Some peculiarities of 
 Pope's poetry are set out in every manual 
 upon English literature. There is his 
 famous theory of " correctness ; " there are 
 the limitations which he accepted or intro- 
 duced into English verse, and the so-called 
 conventionality which produced the so- 
 called reaction of Wordsworth and his 
 school; and it is, of course, necessary to 
 know what were the peculiarities thus in- 
 dicated and what was the history of their 
 \growth and decay. But if it be necessary 
 (to know this, it is necessary also to pass 
 beyond this knowledge. Why did he 
 adopt these canons of taste, and why did 
 they so impress his contemporaries? No 
 answer can be suggested from the bare 
 
 [facts themselves ; you must feel the rela- 
 tion between the facts and the whole 
 spirit of the time. 
 
 Pope, again, was, after a fashion, classi- 
 cal. Some of his best forms are his imita- 
 tions of Horace ; and his most popular 
 was the translation of the " Iliad." Some 
 critics indeed tell us that you will like 
 Pope's "Iliad " better in proportion to your 
 ignorance of Homer's "Iliad." We may 
 grant, in spite of this, that the enjoyment 
 of Pope is facilitated by a knowledge of 
 Homer, and especially of Horace, to whom 
 he had so close an affinity. Yet the ques- 
 tion remains, why did Pope and his con- 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 89 
 
 temporaries venerate the classics? why, 
 for example, did they use * Gothic ' as 
 simply a term of reproach ? what was the 
 spirit of the age which led them to set so 
 high a value upon the qualities which they 
 recognized in classical literature? Unless 
 we can give some sort of answer to such 
 questions we must fail to perceive the sig- 
 nificance of the facts we observe, or to 
 enter really into the spirit of our author. 
 To give an answer we must be able not 
 merely to use the proper formula about 
 certain analogies, but to transport our- 
 selves at will to the first half of the eigh- 
 teenth century. 
 
 Now, I shall not attempt any answer, 
 but I shall try to indicate briefly how an 
 answer should, in my opinion, be sought^ 
 There are, as I conceive, two main direc- 
 tions of study relevant to such an inquiry. 
 We want to know something of the phil- 
 osophy and, still more, something of the 
 social conditions of the time. Pope's^ 
 most ambitious, though not most success- 
 ful work, is the ' Essay on Man.' The 
 'Essay on Man,' is a kind of cento from 
 the popular writers upon philosophy of 
 the day. It is full of passages taken 
 almost bodily from such men as Samuel 
 Clarke and Lord Shaftesbury and Leibnitz, 
 and a great part of it seems to have been a 
 versification of the prose in which Boling- 
 
90 THE STUDY OF 
 
 broke very rashly expressed his views 
 of contemporary philosophy. Reading it 
 without some knowledge of these doc- 
 trines is like reading modern literature 
 without having heard of Darwinism. But 
 the importance of such knowledge is not 
 confined to this particular work, still less 
 i to the explanation of particular phrases 
 I or allusions. It is important because the 
 whole tone of Pope's poetry is determined 
 ' ; by his immersion in the speculations of 
 ! the day. Why is it, for example, that 
 whereas Milton sought to 'justify the 
 ways of God to Man ' by giving a concrete 
 history of the great events which revealed 
 the Divine purpose, Pope adopting the 
 same phrase, and wishing to 'vindicate 
 the ways of God to Man,' proceeds to 
 versify a number of abstract arguments ? 
 The difference was imposed by the con- 
 ditions of the time, by all the differences 
 to which we refer when we say that Mil- 
 ton was a Puritan, and that Pope was what 
 has been called a Christian Deist. 
 ^ To understand that difference we must 
 understand something of the philosophical 
 history of the day, and unless we under- 
 stand it we shall never appreciate the 
 curiously didactic tendency which is one 
 of the marked characteristics not only of 
 the 'Essay on Man,' but of all Pope's 
 best work, and of most of the best work 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 9 1 
 
 of the time, and which leads to its great- 
 est fault, the confusion between the proper 
 spheres of poetry and of logic. To per- 
 ceive Pope's drift, to understand why he 
 adopts modes of utterances which to us 
 seem to be essentially prosaic, and to 
 recognize the poet under the dealer in 
 epigrams and commonplaces, we must 
 know something of the intellectual revolu- 
 tion ; of the immense breach which had 
 taken place between the new philosophy 
 and the old teaching of the schools; of 
 the vast impressions upon the imagina- 
 tion as well as upon the reason of New- 
 
 1 ton's gigantic discoveries ; of the change 
 in the whole modes of reasoning involved 
 in Locke's new departure ; of the kind of 
 deification of ' common sense' character- 
 istic of the philosophy, of the theology, of 
 the politics, and therefore also of the litera- 
 ture of the time. We must appreciate 
 
 /the aspiration expressed in Berkeley's 
 famous verses for a time when men shall 
 cease to impose for truth and sense * the 
 pedantry of courts and schools ; ' the aspira- 
 tion which involved an appeal from learned 
 recluses and monastics wrapped in mystery 
 to the clear common sense of a circle of 
 educated men. That spirit shows itself 
 in all the men of the day in Berkeley, 
 in Addison, in Swift, in Shaftesbury, in 
 Bishop Butler, in Bolingbroke, not less than 
 
92 THE STUDY OF 
 
 in Pope ; and without some sense of that 
 fact you will be at a loss to understand 
 either the aims or the methods of Pope 
 and his contemporaries. 
 
 Briefly, to understand the literature you 
 must know something of the philosophy; 
 and this, though pre-eminently true of a 
 period like Pope's, where the absence of 
 a clear distinction is a special character- 
 istic, is more or less true of all periods. 
 Between Shakespeare and Bacon, between 
 Dryden and Hobbes, between Shelley and 
 Godwin, between Scott and Burke, be- 
 tween Wordsworth's poetry and Cole- 
 ridge's philosophy, there is more than a 
 relation of contemporaneity. I do not 
 mean, however, that any profound philo- 
 sophical study is needed. Far from it. I 
 only mean that you must have some such 
 acquaintance with the general drift of 
 thought as Pope himself possessed 
 which, to say the truth, was superficial 
 enough before you can fairly appreci- 
 ate him, or cease to be repelled by some 
 otherwise unintelligible peculiarities. 
 
 But still more necessary is a study 
 which, in truth, is closely connected with 
 jthis. The study of the philosophy is 
 most intimately connected with the study 
 of society. The philosophical movement 
 was congenial to, if it was not due to, the 
 peculiar conditions of society. No human 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 93 
 
 being was ever more acutely sensitive to 
 the opinions of the day than Pope. No- 
 body ever reflected more accurately the 
 special phrases of the social life. The 
 ' Rape of the Lock/ the 'Dunciad,' or the 
 prologue and epilogue to the Satires, all 
 his most undeniable successes, first take 
 their true coloring when you know the 
 people for whom they were written ; when 
 you have a clear vision of Queen Anne 
 1 taking sometimes counsel and sometimes 
 tea' at Hampton Court, quarrelling with 
 the Duchess of Marlborough, and going 
 to meet Harley at Mrs. Masham's ; when 
 you can elect yourself a member of Addi- 
 son's ' little senate,' where Steele, listen- 
 ing reverentially over his cups, and Bud- 
 gell and Tickell and namby-pamby Philips 
 are sitting round in rapt admiration, or 
 follow the great man to Holland House 
 and watch him writing a ' Spectator ' and 
 revolving round two foci, each marked by 
 a bottle of port ; or sit up with Swift when 
 he gets under his blankets on a cold night 
 to scribble off the last events of the day 
 to Stella, or meet the ' Brothers Club ' at 
 dinner to discuss the proper policy of the 
 Tory ministry ; or drive over with Pope 
 himself in a chariot to sit with Bolingbroke 
 under a hay-stack and talk bad meta- 
 physics in a pasture painted with spades 
 and rakes j or let his waterman row you up 
 
94 THE STUDY OF 
 
 from Westminister stairs to see his garden 
 and present a crystal for his grotto, and 
 talk to Gay and Swift till your host says, 
 'Gentlemen, I leave to your wine,' and 
 leaves three of you to finish the pint from 
 which he has deducted two glasses. You 
 must follow him invisibly to his bed, where 
 he will have paper and pens by his side, lest 
 he should wake in the night, parturient of 
 a couplet, and have no proper cfarrte"' ready 
 for its reception. He will awake raging 
 over some smart saying attributed to Lady 
 Mary or Lord Hervey, and excogitate a 
 stinging retort to be remembered at this 
 day by all educated men, though nine out 
 of ten may have forgotten its origin. Or 
 perhaps he will add a tinge of bitterness 
 to one of the passages in the ' Dunciad,' 
 where he lashes his multitudinous foes, 
 We should see them, too, poor wretches, 
 far away in the recesses of Grub street, in 
 the garret where the printer's devil finds 
 them, robed in an old sack with holes for 
 the passage of their arms, and desperately 
 tearing their way through the translation 
 of a French translation of a classic, with 
 the help of a dictionary. Nor must we' 
 gorget to see Pope on his best side ; to see 
 how his eye shines and his lip trembles 
 when he turns a delicate compliment to 
 an old friend ; with what touching gentle- 
 ness he fondles his old mother, as Wai- 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 95 
 
 pole sneeringly puts it, and wakes, perhaps, 
 to write those exquisite verses which still < 
 show us what true feeling lurked in the 
 deformed and spiteful little bundle of 
 nerves : 
 
 Me let the tender office long engage 
 
 To rock the cradle of reposing age ; 
 
 With lenient arts, extend a mother's breath, 
 
 Make languor smile, and sooth the bed of death ; 
 
 Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, 
 
 And keep awhile one parent from the sky. 
 
 Carlyle could never write about a man 
 till he had framed a credible portrait of 
 his appearance. Macaulay used to ramble 
 in the streets of London, trying to recon- 
 struct a vision of the houses as occupied 
 by the old generation so long vanished 
 from sensible perception. To make some 
 such picture as a background for our poet 
 is, I hold, most essential for a clear appre- 
 ciation. We shall understand the con- 
 ditions under which Pope worked when 
 we know the enemies, big and small, 
 whom he dreaded, and upon whom he took 
 vengeance ; the greater men whose ap- 
 proval he courted with genuine affection ; 
 * the critical circles, who revered him as an 
 {authority because he adopted and reflected 
 Vtheir sentiments with unequalled skill. 
 His best poetry is the incarnation of his 
 and their conversation: the refined and 
 elaborated essence by a man of genius, 
 full of such epigrams as would tell with 
 
96 THE STUDY OF 
 
 men of the world, drinking at the coffee- 
 houses or meeting for friendly suppers to 
 polish their wits by collision ; deficient in 
 romance, for the romantic to such men 
 suggested the ridiculous and the old- 
 fashioned; teaching by direct precept 
 rather than by imagery, for they cared 
 nothing for the old mythology ; embody- 
 ing commonplaces, for the talk of such 
 men avoided the depths and the raptures 
 of poetry, and yet superabundantly keen, 
 sometimes even profound in substance, 
 though never seeking the profound at the 
 risk of obscurity ; and far more often 
 really tender, though shy in openly re- 
 pressing tenderness, and dreading senti- 
 mentality as the deadly sin. Feel this; 
 see these men as they were, and so you 
 will understand why Pope uttered him- 
 self in his characteristic fashion, and see 
 the real power which was hidden under an 
 unfamiliar mask. 
 
 And how to feel this ? By reading some 
 of the most delightful books in the lan- 
 guage. By reading Addison and Swift, 
 and Pope's own correspondence, and Lady 
 Mary's letters, and 'Robinson Crusoe,' and 
 * Gulliver's Travels,' and Gay and Parnell, 
 and a crowd of smaller writers, just as 
 they come in your way. Of all books 
 but I speak professionally, for I refer to 
 my own trade none are more delightful 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 9/ 
 
 than good biographies. 1 I will not sug- 
 gest that you should read a certain dic- 
 tionary of biography, 2 because it is not yet 
 finished, though when it is finished you 
 will have, in fifty moderately thick volumes, 
 a pretty full introduction to English liter- 
 ary history. But I do think that in the 
 study of biography you are led by the 
 pleasantest of paths into the fullest posses- 
 sion of that concrete picture of a man's 
 surroundings which I should desire you to 
 possess. I will take one example. Let 
 me speak from my own experience. I had 
 the good fortune, when a boy, to read 
 what is to me, I will confess, the most 
 purely delightful of all books I mean 
 Boswell's 'Life of Johnson.' I read it 
 from cover to cover, backwards and for- 
 wards, over and over, through and through, 
 till I nearly knew it by heart ; and I should 
 like nothing better than to read it again 
 to-morrow. Just consider to what a circle 
 you are introduced. There are the two 
 main figures, forming a contrast in real 
 life scarcely surpassible by Don Quixote 
 and Sancho Panza Johnson, physically, 
 
 1 For a most admirable lecture on the charms of biography and 
 its value to young people, see a lecture by Phillips Brooks published 
 in volume of sermons, entitled " Sermons delivered at Phillips (Exe- 
 ter, N. H.) Academy." 
 
 2 Reference is made to the " Dictionary of National Biography," 
 Edited by Leslie Stephens, twenty volumes of the fifty announced 
 have been published. 
 
98 THE STUDY OF 
 
 a giant deformed by disease and infirmity ; 
 intellectually, one vast mass of common 
 sense and humorous shrewdness, masked 
 by outrageous prejudices, and, morally, 
 hiding a woman's tenderness and a hero's 
 independence of spirit under the rough- 
 ness of a street porter ; a man who begins 
 by disgusting you, who soon extorts your 
 respect, and who ends by making you love 
 him like a dear friend. And Boswell, the 
 inimitable, who has something amiable in 
 all his follies, even if I may say so, in his 
 vices; whose vanity is redeemed by an 
 unstinted and hearty appreciation of ex- 
 cellence which amounts to genius ; with 
 whom we sympathise because he lays bare 
 so unsparingly weaknesses of his own, 
 which, as our own conscience tells us, are 
 not quite without certain corresponding 
 germs in our own bosoms, who thus makes 
 a kind of vicarious confession for us, which 
 we enjoy though we would not imitate ; 
 whose indomitable gaiety, whose boundless 
 powers of enjoying every excitement, even 
 the excitement of confessing his sins and 
 making good resolutions for the future, 
 disarms all our antipathies this unparal- 
 leled fool of genius attracts us as much as 
 the master whose steps he dogged, and 
 whose very foibles he copied. 
 
 And this delightful pair are only the 
 centre of a circle. Boswell opens the door 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 99 
 
 to the whole literary history of the century. 
 Johnson comes into contact in his youth 
 with Pope and Swift, who had known the 
 wits of Charles's days, and in his age with 
 Hannah More, who made a pet of Ma- 
 caulay, and with Miss Burney, who lived 
 long enough to have made, if she had 
 chosen, a pet of me. By friendship or 
 hostility he touches all the great English- 
 men of his time. Think only of three 
 friends, of all of whom Boswell gives us 
 the most intimate glimpses: Burke, in- 
 comparably the greatest writer upon politi- 
 cal philosophy whom these islands have 
 ever produced; Goldsmith, who 'touched 
 nothing that he did not adorn/ author of 
 some of the most exquisite poetry and of 
 the most exquisite idyl of country life in 
 our language ; and Reynolds, the first of 
 English painters, who still preserves for 
 us the most admirable representations of 
 his great contemporaries, and whose art 
 seems to admit us to the most charming 
 domesticities of the day, and might teach 
 even women to find a new charm in in- 
 fancy." These are only the most conspicu- 
 ous figures in a gallery including so many 
 eminent figures, and full of characteristic 
 touches even when we have to do with 
 their hostile encounters. We smile now at 
 Johnson's judgments of Rousseau, whom 
 he would have sentenced to transportation, 
 
,7? 
 
 IOO THE STUDY OF 
 
 Mi 
 
 Homer, whose philosophy he re- 
 
 ana of 
 
 garded as an illustration of the folly of 
 trying to milk the bull when you are not 
 satisfied with the cow. To know an epoch 
 we want to know its prejudices as well as 
 its new ideas, and of the most dogged 
 prejudices we certainly find an ample crop 
 in Boswell. 
 
 And where should we find a better illus- 
 tration of the stalwart loyalty of the day 
 than in Johnson's two famous interviews 
 with George III. and with the arch-dema- 
 gogue Wilkes the last the very gem of 
 Boswell's unsurpassable book. ' Johnson,' 
 says Carlyle, 'was the last of the Tories.' 
 In studying Boswell you will learn to 
 know what that means. When you have 
 read it you have had a glimpse both of 
 the tendencies, social and intellectual, 
 which were thus bringing on the revolu- 
 tion, and of that huge mass of manly, pig- 
 headed, prejudiced, stupid, judicious, sel- 
 fish, patriotic, invincible common sense 
 which crushed for a time the revolution- 
 ist of England, though it was far indeed 
 from exterminating the seeds of a pro- 
 found revolution. You might go far to 
 complete your study by reading two de- 
 ightful, though curiously contrasted, col- 
 ections of letters the letters of the 
 lovable recluse Cowper, who incidentally 
 reveals what was fermenting in quiet 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. IOI 
 
 country circles, and the most admirable 
 letters of the not too lovable Walpole, 
 which will show you what was going 
 on in circles which scarcely deigned to 
 cast an eye upon Johnson. It will be set 
 before you by an observer whom Macaulay 
 chooses to ridicule as a fribble unworthy 
 of serious attention, but who, if I be not 
 greatly mistaken, had, beneath all his 
 affectations, one of the keenest eyes of all 
 his contemporaries, and who certainly 
 wrote letters unsurpassable in the English 
 language. If he had some of the failings 
 generally attributed to the French, he 
 had, what is far rarer, some of the high 
 qualities which make the French unri- 
 valled as memoir writers and corresoond- 
 ents. 
 
 Through sucn readings, I have said, you 
 gain a vivid concrete picture of the men 
 of the day. You will learn of the folly of 
 the fashion, now dying out, of simply 
 abusing the eighteenth century. 1 You will 
 learn how many men then lived admirable 
 domestic lives, how much there was of 
 kindliness and good feeling, and sincere 
 wish to grapple with the evils of the day. 
 Such a study will help, as I have hinted, to 
 a genuine appreciation of the political, the 
 
 1 Read a vigorous article by Frederic Harrison on " A few words 
 about the Eighteenth Century," in the Nineteenth Century for 
 March, 1883, also to be found in Harrison's "Choice of Books," 
 complete edition. 
 
IO2 THE STUDY OF 
 
 social, and the ecclesiastical movements 
 of the time. And therefore by the same 
 process it will enable you to enter into 
 the literature to understand Johnson's 
 'Vanity of Human Wishes ' and ' Rasselas ' 
 and * Lives of the Poets,' even, it may be, 
 his ' Rambler/ which I admit is greatly in 
 need of some shoeing-horn to delight 
 in Goldsmith's * Traveller/ and 'Vicar of 
 Wakefield/ to enjoy Gray's exquisite art, 
 much as it was reviled by Johnson, at the 
 same time that you will penetrate into the 
 priceless treasure-trove of Burke's politi- 
 cal wisdom, and even judge more wisely 
 of Gibbon's monumental history, or of 
 Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations/ 
 
 You may be inclined to say that I am 
 making large demands. For a Macaulay 
 jor a Carlyle, who wish to present a com- 
 Iplete picture of the whole complex life of 
 ja period, such reading may be desirable 
 or necessary. But most of us have neither 
 the portentous memory of Macaulay nor 
 the imaginative intensity of Carlyle, nor 
 the opportunity of poring over the old 
 records till we can reclothe the dead bones 
 of history. To this I reply, first, that the 
 time required is not so very great. To 
 read Boswell and Walpole and Cowper, to 
 glance over a few old periodicals like the 
 ' Gentleman's Magazine' and the 'Annual 
 Register/ to read the regular histories of 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 1O3 
 
 the day, so as to have a skeleton map of 
 dates and facts, requires no exclusive ab- 
 sorption in the study. A little leisure 
 and a little enthusiasm will go a very 
 long way. But I must next reply that 
 study of this kind, like the others I have 
 mentioned, is still in one respect not suffi- 
 cient, and in another not necessary. It 
 is not sufficient, because after all, what a 
 man wants for the appreciation of books 
 is not so much to have this or that kind of 
 knowledge as to be a clever fellow and to 
 have a sensitive nature. A great though 
 misunderstood philosopher, called Dog- 
 berry, observed that 'to read and write 
 comes by nature.' With proper limits, 
 that aphorism, as applied to the reading 
 or writing of books, is very sound. You 
 want faculties which cannot be put into 
 you, if they are absent, by any education, 
 and which have a provoking way of assert- 
 ing their existence to the great con- 
 fusion of education theorists when they 
 have received none of the orthodox pabu- 
 lum. I don't want to say a word against 
 education. If I did, indeed, I should 
 probably be here in some personal danger. 
 In reality, I only wish to argue on behalf 
 of a wide and thorough education. But 
 we ought, in honesty, to recognize one 
 fact sometimes neglected. A good educa- 
 tion for literary purposes is by no means 
 
IO4 THE STUDY OF 
 
 exclusively an education in literature. To 
 appreciate Shakespeare you want some- 
 thing much more important than cram- 
 ming with facts. To enjoy ' Romeo and 
 Juliet ' the best qualification is to be 
 one-and-twenty (which is compatible with 
 being also thirty or forty). To enjoy 
 ' Hamlet ' it is, perhaps, better to be, let 
 us say, fifty-four. The education which 
 comes through life, through the posses- 
 sion of certain passions and feelings, is 
 the most important of all education. But, 
 I hasten to observe, this does not tell 
 against education in general, but only 
 against a narrow education which fails to 
 stimulate all our powers. The best way 
 to learn military arts is not to be drilled 
 in them from childhood, but to spend many 
 childish hours in field sports and games 
 which brace the nerves and sharpen the 
 eyes. I will venture to say what may 
 ^sound paradoxical. 
 
 Of all studies that which has the least 
 in common with literary study is, I sup- 
 pose, the study of mathematics. I will 
 add that mathematicians are apt to acquire 
 certain rather mistaken prejudices in lite- 
 rary matters. But if I were asked whether 
 a young man would best fit himself for a 
 literary career or for the study of litera- 
 ture by reading books about authors or by 
 reading mathematics (supposing him to 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 1 05 
 
 have only time for one pursuit), I should 
 unhesitatingly advise mathematics. Not, 
 of course, that he will learn anything 
 directly useful. He will never require to 
 apply the binomial theorem to the criti- 
 cism of 'Paradise Lost.' But an exclu- 
 sive reading of mere criticism on literary 
 history has a strong tendency to make a 
 man a prig, to suppress all spontaneous 
 and independent judgment, and to leave 
 his general faculties undeveloped. A study 
 of mathematics, on the other hand, has 
 been, since Plato's days, the most admir- 
 able system of intellectual gymnastics 
 ever devised ; it braces and invigorates the 
 mental fibre, it makes a man appreciate 
 clear, vigorous, uncompromising reason, 
 and familiarizes him with the most per- j 
 fectly adequate expression of certain forms 
 of thought. Therefore, though he has 
 not the information required, though he 
 has not learnt a single applicable truth, he 
 has so far the advantage of coining to any 
 study with vigorous faculty, with a trained 
 perception for certain essential qualities 
 of all good work, scientific and literary, 
 and without being sworn to the special 
 tenets of any little critical school. He \ 
 will at least appreciate the cardinal virtue j 
 of clearness. I confess that I attach 
 more importance to the judgment of a"* 
 man of vigorous intellect tackling a new 
 
 r\ 
 
 V 
 
IO6 THE STUDY OF 
 
 book without any knowledge of previous 
 critical dogmas than to the judgment of 
 the professed critic of less vigor who 
 utters his opinions in mortal fear of 
 contradicting something that has been 
 said by Ste.-Beuve or Mr. Matthew Ar- 
 nold. 
 
 And this brings me to the second point, 
 that such training as I have suggested is 
 not essential. I have tried to show, and 
 it is my firm belief, that it is extremely 
 useful, especially when combined with all 
 other means of training. But I cannot 
 conclude without also insisting upon the 
 fact that even if it be not attainable there 
 is still no reason why a man should not 
 learn, within certain limits, to enjoy and 
 appreciate the masterpieces of literature. 
 This is rather a delicate subject, but I 
 must seek very briefly to explain what I 
 think. There is an old controversy as to 
 the relative value of the critical and the 
 vulgar judgment of books. At times, as 
 in the familiar cases of Bunyan and De- 
 foe, the vulgar have forced the critics to 
 accept their verdict. At times the criti- 
 cal few have recognised merit which has 
 only by degrees won acceptance with the 
 multitude. The critics, like the vulgar, 
 have special weaknesses and prejudices 
 which often obscure their judgment. 
 Without arguing the point, I am content 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. IO/ 
 
 to observe that, in my opinion, lasting 
 success with either class is enough to 
 prove merit, and that, in any case, the 
 fact that the ignorant have sometimes 
 had the best of it is enough to prove that 
 an ignorant person may have a sound 
 judgment. He has the great advantage" 
 of spontaniety of admiring a thing be- 
 cause it affects him, not because he has 
 been told that he ought to admire it. 
 / To preserve this spontaneity in all our 
 /judgments should be one of our very first 
 "/objects, however much training we may 
 / undergo. Sincerity in such matters is of 
 the very essence of all sound opinion. 
 There are, I think, two rules in this ma1>" 
 ter. Never persuade yourself that you- 
 like what you don't like ; not if it be 
 ' Faust ' or ' Hamlet/ or the ' Divina Corn- 
 media/ or the ' Iliad.' Sham liking is fai^ 
 worse than honest stupidity. But, again, 
 do not presume to think that your dis- 
 like to an accepted masterpiece proves it 
 not to be a masterpiece. The chances are 
 a thousand or a million to one that you 
 are wrong, and not all the generations 
 which have accepted them. If Shakes- 
 peare was not a poet, Shakespeare's in- 
 fluence is as great a mystery as would be 
 the elevation of Vesuvius without volcanic 
 energy. Confess, therefore, your inca- 
 pacity, and by all means confess it frankly, 
 
IO8 THE STUDY OF 
 
 but do not parade it as a discovery. Try 
 again, and see if Shakespeare will not 
 improve. If he doesn't, try to explain 
 why he has impressed other people, and 
 calculate the chances of its being due to 
 their folly or to your obtuseness. 
 
 But can we in any case expect a genu- 
 ine appreciation without preparatory train- 
 ing without knowing the history of a 
 book, the age in which it was produced, 
 the parallel phenomena in other litera- 
 tures, and so forth ? To that question I 
 think that an answer may be suggested 
 by one fact which is tolerably familiar to 
 you here, and which I mention with all 
 due reserve. You have all read 'Old 
 Mortality.' You areacquainted with Mause 
 Headrigg and Ephraim Macbriar and Bal- 
 four of Burley. Each of those admirable 
 types of the old Covenanters is familiar, 
 beyond the familiarity of mere literary 
 students, with the one book which to many 
 Scots in their rank of life has been the 
 whole of literature, and the study of which 
 was the only preparatory study for one of 
 the masterpieces of our language, the 
 'Pilgrim's Progress.' The Bible is read 
 by millions who know hardly any other 
 book, and who know and care nothing for 
 any auxiliary study. To them, of course, 
 it is something far more than a mere lite- 
 rary study. But do they or do they not 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. IO9 
 
 appreciate, for example, the Psalms of 
 David not simply as inspired docu- 
 ments, but as exalted poetry ? If I may 
 take Scott's judgment, as represented in 
 such characters as Mause Headrigg or 
 Davie Deans, the answer is not perfectly 
 simple. Such people, he would obviously 
 say, managed to find what they sought; 
 the phrase about smiting the Amalekite 
 hip and thigh suited them better than the 
 precept of turning the second cheek ; they 
 found a pattern in Jael's treatment of 
 Sisera, and somehow failed to pay equal 
 attention to the parable of the Good Sam- 
 aritan. And, moreover, Scott would have 
 said, or we may certainly say for him, that 
 their views of history would not have 
 been those of the most judicious inquirers, 
 and that they had very erroneous opinions 
 as to the circumstances and times under 
 which the Old and New Testaments were 
 composed. Yet as evidently they were 
 profoundly influenced by their studies ; 
 the Biblical language and history had 
 entered into their very souls ; and the 
 narrative which they revered, the Psalms 
 which became their battle-cry, had no 
 small share in generating that heroic 
 courage under torture and defeat which 
 Scott, with all his Cavalier prejudices 
 and all his abhorrence of Jacobinism, can- 
 not help recognizing, as a chivalrous 
 
IIO THE STUDY OF 
 
 antagonist, amongst the persecuted Cove- 
 nanters. 
 
 Now, making all due corrections, we 
 may, I think, deduce from this instance 
 some of the limitations and merits of un- 
 trained reading. The man who reads 
 1 without note or comment/ trusts to his 
 own unaided sagacity, and makes no auxili- 
 ary studies, has undoubtedly some enor- 
 mous disadvantages. He will be liable to 
 error if he reasons upon the books he loves 
 as historical documents ; for, of course, it 
 is essential in that view to know all that 
 can be known of the time and conditions 
 of authorship. He will be liable to blunder 
 if he speaks as a critic; he may cite as 
 proofs of original genius what is mani- 
 festly borrowed, and entirely misconceive 
 the true relations of his favorite books to 
 other literature, Lamb, who read the 
 English drama as a lover, who entered 
 into its spirit as no one has done, and 
 interprets it with unrivalled felicity, only 
 illustrated his own want of knowledge 
 when he ventured upon asserting the 
 superiority of Marlowe's ' Dr. Faustus ' 
 to Goethe's ' Faust.' 
 
 The simple reader, again, who reads 
 like Lamb, is specially likely to read into 
 books where he should read out of them ; 
 to attribute to the authors his own thoughts, 
 and to find edification like the proverbial 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. Ill 
 
 old lady in the blessed word ' Mesopotamia' 
 to confound between an author's mean- 
 ing and the thoughts which he accidentally 
 suggests. To be fair, we should perhaps 
 add that the most ignorant of critics can 
 hardly excel some philosophical commen- 
 tators in this respect German critics of 
 Shakespeare, for example. But for mere 
 literary purposes this failing is of less 
 importance than the opposite error the 
 error of leaving out instead of adding; 
 the ignorant reader not only misses special 
 allusions to facts or to previous writers, 
 but frequently a writer's whole drift : the 
 covert satire which is really the vitalising 
 salt of an epigram ; the political or philo- 
 sophical inference which is suggested in- 
 stead of bluntly stated; he fails to per- 
 ceive the intensity of passion which burns 
 under a studiously compressed manner, or 
 the sagacity which pierces some current 
 sophism by the assertion of some obvious 
 truth now looking like a commonplace ; and 
 he is kept at a distance by some mannerism 
 or conventional mode of speech which 
 really only lies on the surface. Shakes- 
 peare's Ulysses speaks of that ' touch of 
 nature which makes the whole world kin/ 
 that 
 
 With one consent praise newborn gauds, 
 Though they are made and moulded of things past, 
 And give to dust that is a little gilt 
 More laud than gilt o'erdusted. 
 
112 THE STUDY OF 
 
 We all more or less suffer from the illusion 
 which leads us to value the coinage, not 
 in proportion to its intrinsic value, but to 
 the gloss of novelty and to the modern- 
 ness of the image and superscription. It 
 is the common error, in short, which 
 makes us prefer the last volumes from the 
 circulating library to Scott or Fielding, or 
 to regard the last leading article as eclips- 
 ing Junius or even the ' Letters on a Regi- 
 cide Peace.' It is right, indeed, as well 
 as almost inevitable, that we should be 
 toiore interested by our contemporaries 
 than by writers of the past ; but it is un- 
 desirable, it is indeed fatal to true literary 
 appreciation, that we should be deluded 
 by this error of intellectual perspective 
 into misconceiving the true magnitude of 
 the fixed stars of literature when we are 
 blinded by the meteors of to-day. And 
 this is precisely the main use of those 
 auxiliary studies of which I have spoken. 
 Since the great men lose some influence 
 by not being our contemporaries, we must 
 be able to make ourselves their contempo- 
 raries ; to get rid of this common illusion ; 
 to overcome an obstacle which, though 
 often trifling in itself, may frequently 
 generate a complete incapacity for per- 
 ceiving the true relations of things, and 
 : permanently withhold from us possessions 
 \ which, when we have once made a little 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 113 
 
 effort, become invaluable. It is briefly 
 the function of such study to rub off the 
 dust which makes the gold less attractive ^ 
 than the base metal gilt. 
 
 In this sense, the use of such studies, 
 however great, is yet negative, They re- 
 move a film from our eyes, but cannot of 
 themselves give us eyesight. The reading 
 of the ignorant man has often the super- 
 lative advantage, that it is a reading of 
 love. The greatest writers show their 
 power in nothing more than this, that they 
 put so much inextinguishable fire into 
 their work that even at the distance of 
 centuries, with all the disadvantages of 
 unfamiliar language and unintelligible allu- 
 sions, and half unintelligible purpose, the 
 glow can be felt beneath the drift and 
 accumulation of centuries by men who are 
 congenial in soul though unprepared by 
 culture, Keats could feel the charm of 
 Homer through the translation of Chap- 
 man, though Chapman had been dead for 
 two centuries and Homer belonged to an 
 almost prehistoric world. The Psalms of 
 David, I have said, stir millions who have 
 no preparatory knowledge except of their 
 own language. And frequently a man can 
 wrestle and struggle into a perception of 
 the essential meaning and beauty of a 
 great author with surprisingly little train- 
 ing. But, as a rule, such a feat can only 
 
\ 
 
 114 THE STUDY OF 
 
 be achieved by men of abnormal intelli- 
 gence. Judicious training can greatly 
 diminish the impediments which keep at 
 bay all but the keenest intelligence, and 
 help to complete the knowledge and 
 strengthen the perceptions even of the 
 keenest. Most of us are absolutely in 
 need of it, and every one may be helped 
 by it. Yet that is not enough unless the 
 patient can also minister to himself ; unless 
 he has that intense appetite for the~study 
 which will sometimes overcome all appar- 
 ent obstacles, though it will be the keener 
 when the obstacles are removed. To teach 
 so as to stimulate that appetite and not 
 to quench it it by irrelevant cram is the 
 great problem for the teacher. And 
 therefore I will add one corollary : as a 
 rule, the best way of beginning the study 
 of literature is to read that book which 
 you can read with pleasure, or, if possible, 
 with enthusiasm. I will not say I wish 
 I could that there are no mischievous 
 books. But (making obvious deductions) 
 I am quite ready to accept with Gibbon 
 the 'tolerating maxim of the elder Pliny' 
 that there is hardly any book from which 
 you cannot derive some good. I am con- 
 vinced that no reading is good which is 
 not in some degree reading with an appe- 
 tite. I am almost ready to invert the 
 maxim, and to say that all reading with 
 an appetite is necessarily good. 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 115 
 
 Some distinguished men have recently 
 been amusing themselves with the insolu- 
 ble problem, Which are the best hundred 
 books? 1 I say insoluble, because to my 
 mind the best book for any man is that 
 in which he takes most interest ; and 
 as men's powers and tastes vary indefi- 
 nitely, and there is no power and no 
 ftaste which may not be stimulated by 
 [reading, so the suitability of books de- 
 jpends upon the idiosyncrasy of the reader. 
 One man prefers metaphysics and another 
 poetry ; one is a devourer of novels and 
 another of biography, and a third of travels, 
 and a fourth of history, and a fifth of 
 antiquarian research, and a sixth of theo- 
 logical controversy, and a seventh of poli- 
 tics ; one likes the classics and another 
 Oriental or modern English literature ; one 
 is an enthusiast for Scott, and one for 
 
 1 " You hear a great deal nowadays of the worst nonsense ever 
 uttered since men were born on earth. Best hundred of books! 
 Have you ever yet read one good book well? For a Scotchman, 
 next to his Bible, there is but one book, his native land ; but one 
 language, his native tongue the sweetest, richest, subtlest, most 
 musical of all the living dialects of Europe. Study your Burns, 
 Scott, and Carlyle. Scott, in his Scottish novels only, and of those 
 only the cheerful ones, with the Heart of Midlothian, but not the 
 Bride ofLammermoor, nor the Legend of Montrose, nor the Pirate* 
 Here is a right list : Waverly, Guy Mannering, The A ntiquary, 
 Rob Roy, Old Mortality, The Monastery, The Abbot, Red Gaunt- 
 let, Heart of Midlothian. Get any of them you can, in the old 
 large print edition when you have a chance, and study every sen- 
 tence in them. They are models of every virtue in their order of 
 literature and exhaustive codes of Christian wisdom and ethics." 
 John Ruskin. 
 
Il6 THE STUDY OF 
 
 Coleridge, and a third for Alexandra Du- 
 mas, and so forth. Which is the best? 
 That depends on the man ; but all are good, 
 and whichever rouses his mind most, and 
 commands his sympathies most powerfully, 
 is in all probability the best for him. 
 ^Literature represents all the reasonings 
 and feelings and passions of civilised men 
 Jin all ages. As Coleridge says 
 
 All thoughts, all passions, all desires, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 
 All are but ministers of Love, 
 And feed his sacred flame. 
 
 / We may apply the words to genius. To 
 j select any particular variety as best for 
 I all is as absurd as to say that every man 
 ' ought to be a priest or that every man 
 ought to be a soldier. But this I may say, 
 Take hold anywhere, read what you really 
 like and not what some one tells you that 
 jou ought to like; let your reading be 
 $j* j |P art f your lives. It may have a bear- 
 ling upon your true interests and the func- 
 tion which you are to discharge in the 
 world ; or it may be a relief to the occupa- 
 -tions in which you are immersed. Even 
 if it be a mere recreation, let it be such a 
 recreation as may be subservient to your 
 highest development a rule which is of 
 course applicable to every employment, 
 from preaching to playing football. But, 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 1 1/ 
 
 in any case, remember that reading worthy 
 of the name is not the acquisition of a set 
 of dates and facts, or a knowledge of the 
 correct critical labels, but an occupation 
 which to be pursued to any purpose must 
 be pursued with zeal must become, if it 
 should not begin by being, a real and keen 
 enjoyment, and which should end by be- 
 coming not a mere luxury but a necessity 
 of life. 
 
 If there should be some people who 
 find, after all, that reading anything is a 
 bore, I shall simply point out to them 
 that there are many occupations besides 
 reading, and some of them quite as use- 
 ful. You may study science and art, or 
 be active philanthropists, though you 
 never read anything more nearly ap- 
 proaching literature than Euclid or the 
 reports of the association for the benefit 
 of distressed washerwomen. Literature 
 should be content with its genuine wor- 
 shippers, and not stoop to enlist the ser- 
 vices of mere hypocrites. But I am 
 equally certain that most of us can find 
 something to read, something the reading 
 of which can become a ruling passion, 
 something, too, which will please our in- 
 tellects, give keenness to our perceptions 
 and strength to our sympathies, something 
 which will make us better specimens of 
 the human race, and more fitted to dis 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 charge any of the duties which lie before 
 us. And if fully to qualify ourselves re- 
 quires a struggle, it is a struggle which 
 will bring an ample reward. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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