88 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lives of our great writers, and with the opinions of other men about 

 their works. 



The student must go directly to the literature and study its master- 

 pieces in their original forms, with the very spelling and punctuation 

 of the authors. Study each work in the most thorough way : study 

 every part, every sentence, every line, every word : study every allu- 

 sion, every illustration, every figure : study every thought, every opin- 

 ion, every argument : study every fact in the author's life, every fact 

 in the history of his time, that will help in any way to an understand- 

 ing and appreciation of the work. No book of extracts should be 

 used, A work of genius must be studied as a whole. If you can 

 give but a few days to a writer, study some entire short work in pref- 

 erence to using extracts from larger works. A student will get far 

 more profit out of Milton's "lycidas " studied in this way than from 

 going through " Paradise Lost " in the ordinary way. 



Take a play of Shakespeare— what an instrument for the highest 

 culture ! How rich the rewards of diligent labor in this mine ! What 

 more inspiring thing is possible for a human mind than to be brought 

 so near to the foremost mind of all this world's history ? I am not dis- 

 posed to undervalue the grand literatures of Greece and Rome ; they 

 mark the highest tide of human thought in the old-world civilization; 

 and yet, in their combined worth, they are outvalued by Shakespeare 

 alone — without counting in the worth of Chaucer, Langland, Spenser, 

 Bacon, Hooker, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth^ Tennyson — may the roll 

 stretch out " to the crack of doom ! " How unwise in us, in our anx- 

 iety to teach our children the language of Plato and Cicero, to leave 

 them in ignorance of the language of their own forefathers ! I trust 

 the time will speedily come when no man or woman, who is unable to 

 read at sight a page of English of any age from Alfred to Victoriaj 

 will be considered liberally educated, whatever else he or she may 

 know. 



Certainly much has been done in the last ten years to encourage us. 

 In the time of Richard II., in 1385, English was admitted into English 

 schools as a teaching medium : the close of our century will witness its 

 full admission into English and American schools as a teaching subject. 

 The future historian will record the significant fact that in our age the 

 boys and girls of England and America were for the first time in- 

 structed carefully in the great classics of their mother-tongue — that 

 they knew Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Bacon, as the boys and girls 

 of Greece knew Homer, and Sophocles, and Plato. 



Greek itself was admitted, as a subject of study, into the English 

 universities in the sixteenth century, only after a long and fierce battle 

 between the Greeks and the Trojans of that day. "There were many, 

 then, who from various points of view echoed the sentiment expressed 

 by the Duke of Norfolk in 1540. ''I never read the Scripture^ said 

 that adherent of the departing age, ''nor never will read it. It was 



