398 THE SCHOOL BOARDS xv 



make the severest deductions which fair criticism 

 can dictate for shortcomings and positive errors; 

 ehminate, as a sensible lay-teacher would do, if 

 left to himself, all tliat it is not desirable for 

 children to occupy themselves witli; and there 

 still remains in this old literature a vast residuum 

 of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider 

 the great historical fact that, for three centuries, 

 this book has been woven into the life of all that 

 is best and noblest in English history; that it has 

 become the national epic of Britain, and is as 

 familiar to nol)le and simple, from Jolm-o'-Groat's 

 House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once 

 were to the Italians; that it is written in the 

 noblest and purest English, and abounds in ex- 

 quisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, 

 that it forbids the veriest hind who never left 

 his village to be ignorant of the existence of other 

 countries and other civilisations, and of a great 

 past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the 

 oldest nations in the world. By the study of what 

 other book could children be so much humanised 

 and made to feel that each figure in that vast his- 

 torical procession fills, like themselves, but a mo- 

 mentary space in the interval between two eter- 

 nities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all 

 time, according to its effort to do good and hate 

 evil, even as they also are earning their payment 

 for their work? 



On the whole, then, I am in favour of reading 



