mj A LIBERAL EDUCATION. 49' 



is not compelled to read half a dozen times as many 

 German, as English, books? And whether, of 1 these 

 English books, more than one in ten is the work of 

 a fellow of a college, or a professor of an English 

 university ? 



Is this from any lack of power in the English as 

 compared with the German mind? The countrymen 

 of Grote and of Mill, of Faraday, of Eobert Brown, 

 of Lyell, and of Darwin, to go no further back than 

 the contemporaries of men of middle age, can afford 

 to smile at such a suggestion. England can show now, 

 as she has been able to show in every generation since 

 civilization spread over the West, individual men who 

 hold their own against the world, and keep alive the 

 old tradition of her intellectual eminence. 



But, in the majority of cases, these men are what 

 they are in virtue of their native intellectual force, and 

 of a strength of character which will not recognise impedi- 

 ments. They , are not trained in the courts of the 

 Temple of Science, but storm the walls of that edifice in 

 all sorts of irregular ways, and with much loss of time 

 and power, in order to obtain their legitimate positions. 



Our universities not only do not encourage such men ; 

 do not offer them positions, in which it should be their 

 highest duty to do, thoroughly, that which they are most 

 capable of doing ; but, as far as possible, university train- 

 ing shuts out of the minds of those among them, who 

 are subjected to it, the prospect that there is anything in 

 the world for which they are specially fitted. Imagine 

 the success of the attempt to still the intellectual hunger 

 of any of the men I have mentioned, by putting before 

 him, as the object of existence, the successful mimicry 

 of the measure of a Greek song, or the roll of Ciceronian 

 prose ! Imagine how much success would be likely 

 to attend the attempt to persuade such men, that the 



