4 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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and it is very important that his researches should be rightly directed. 

 In a word, he is now ripe for understanding, or beginning to under- 

 stand, more than a language a literature, or the records of a nation. 

 That he is ripe for so much as this is obvious from the fact that the 

 students at our universities do learn more than the mere Latin and 

 Greek of the classics they learn the subject-matter of the books; and 

 this, especially at Cambridge, is taking place more and more. When, 

 then, we see that modern languages are studied at schools, and not at 

 the universities, it is obvious that the question respecting them has been 

 very incompletely apprehended ; it has been quite forgotten that they 

 are connected with a very wide and important field of knowledge. 



It is, therefore, the study of modern literatures rather than the 

 study of modern languages that is here discussed ; and for this reason 

 the question relates rather to universities than to schools. Let us, 

 then, consider what is the value of those incidental exceptions to which 

 allusion was made just now ; what, in short, is the actual amount of 

 instruction in modern periods given at the universities. In such exam- 

 inations as the law and modern history examination at Oxford, the 

 law tripos and the moral science tripos at Cambridge, a good deal of 

 acquaintance with certain aspects of modern times is required. And 

 there have been at Cambridge, at different times, proposals for a his- 

 tory tripos, to comprise all history, ancient and modern ; proposals 

 which, however, did not obtain any large acceptance, and were, per- 

 haps, rather made by those who wished to see the historical element 

 eliminated from the classical tripos than by those who wished to see it 

 introduced anywhere else. 



Those, however, who think that any or all of the examinations 

 above-mentioned will give those who prepare for them an adequate 

 acquaintance with the nations of the modern world, take a very me- 

 chanical view of that which is meant by a nation. Nations, like indi- 

 viduals, or rather much more than individuals, extend far beyond any 

 particular line of their action. The most accurate student of the law 

 and philosophy of modern times will not thereby know any thing 

 about military, commercial, and educational systems. Nor is it rea- 

 sonable to think that there can be a separate course of study for each 

 separate branch of national existence. The branches are much too 

 numerous ; it is necessary that all but the few that are of most extreme 

 importance should be combined in a general system, having its centre 

 in that which is the voice of the nation, in that which comes nearest 

 to the very heart and being of the nation, namely, the literature. It 

 is quite possible in such a mode of study to go far beyond the mere 

 litterateur, the dabbler in criticism and politics. However much it be 

 true that the literature must be the centre, yet that the researches of 

 the student should stop with the literature need not and ought not to 

 be the case. To take a single instance from English authors. How 

 full is Milton, both in his prose works and in his poetry, of allusions to 



