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story, how I should have stared! But no one challenged my incredulity with such a paradox. I plodded apathetically onward, little dreaming that the tedious old gentleman with his ablative absolutes was not only one of the greatest but one of the most romantic characters the world had ever seen. Not many beginners, I dare say, are now left quite so much in the dark; but when, by chance, I read the introduction to a school classic, I cannot wonder that the boys for whom it is intended should, as a rule, prefer to skip it, and should cherish the tradition that history is "dull."

"But is your schoolboy to have no knowledge of Latin literature, save in brief snippets from the historians and orators?" With the place and function of literature in education I shall deal in the next chapter. Here let me only remind the reader that so far I have not brought our schoolboy beyond the age of thirteen at the utmost. I have conceived his time, from seven to thirteen, as divided between Science and History, both placed before him with the constant endeavour to awaken his imagination, to stimulate his faculties of wonder and awe, and to make him realise that the world is no tedious or humdrum place of

sojourn, but a treasure-house of absorbing interests, which he could not possibly exhaust were his life protracted to the span of Methusaleh. About thirteen, he should reach, I take it, the parting of the ways, and decide which of the two lines of study is to engage the greater share of his energies. If he decide for history, he also decides for its "breath and finer spirit"-literature.

VIII

THE FETISH OF GRAMMAR

SOMEWHERE between twelve and fourteen, then, a boy would make choice of his career, or at any rate of his main interest in life. If he proposed to become a doctor or engineer (civil or military) or artilleryman or manufacturer or chemist or sailor, he would give more time to science and less to history. He would renounce altogether the idea of learning Greek. Whether he went so far into Roman history as to read the chief Latin classics in the original might depend on individual taste and facility-for some boys, unless I am greatly mistaken, have a knack of reading Latin with ease, which is denied to others of equal intelligence. If he "kept up his Latin" at all he would read rapidly, with a view to literary and historical,

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not linguistic, profit. Mediæval history he would be content to take in broad outline. far the greater part of the time abstracted from science should be given to the history of his own country (which he would find inextricably interwoven with that of France and America) and to the history of his own language. The latter study would involve the knowledge of some Teutonic dialect; so that at this point the necessities both of his historical and of his scientific reading would the acquisition of German. Where does that come in?"

impose upon him "And literature? Have I not said

that, apart from science, his chief study should be the history of his own country? And who can know aught worth knowing of English history who does not take English literature along with it?

If, on the other hand, he proposed to seek his career in the law, or the Church, or the less scientific branches of soldiering, in politics, art, journalism, or the civil service, he would slackoff on the side of science (though certainly without abandoning it) and devote himself

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"Intellectual culture, at the end of the nineteenth century, must include as its most essential element a scientific habit of mind; and a scientific habit of mind

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mainly to history. For him, too, no doubt, the history (always including the literature and language) of his own country would be the most imperative of interests; but he would also be able to go back upon ancient and mediæval history, looking beneath its merely picturesque and romantic aspects, and studying its philosophical and sociological import. I suggest, without insistence, that the usual aim should be for the student to know "something of everything and everything of something." That is to say, he should have in his mind an outline map of the whole field, while he should make a special and minute survey of one of two provinces.

We are now, at last, face to face with the question of what is known as a "classical education." When a boy has determined that his special interest does not lie in the direction of science, ought he, as a rule, to go through anything like the course of study which now prevails on the "classical side" of our public schools? Quite distinctly my answer is, "As a rule-no!" Some boys, no doubt, may

can only be acquired by the methodical study of some part, at least, of what the human race has come scientifically to know."-HENRY SIDGWICK.

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