ee. 
103 
appreciable degree familiar to them. Iam not forgetting that a 
Towneley of Towneley made one of the finest collections of 
ancient Sculpture; he was an exception to the rule, and he was 
not strictly provincial, for men of his wealth and station lived so 
much in the capital and abroad that they often imbibed the best 
culture of the world. The ordinary country gentleman at the 
beginning of the present century was not the illiterate squire of 
an earlier period; he had not the feudal contempt for letters ; 
he thought it a credit to be well educated in the classics; he 
sometimes learned French, and he desired to give the advantages 
of education to his sons, which he did to the best of his ability 
when he could afford it. The English poets who were contem- 
porary with Wordsworth found readers in rural England. The 
older English literature was still valued in places remote from 
the culture of the capital. This, of course, is rather a favourable 
picture, for I am describing the better specimens of the class. 
Many in the higher circles of a provincial town in those days 
would know very little about literature of any elevated or 
elevating kind. Let us be charitable to our grandfathers as we 
may wish our grandsons to think charitably of us. But however 
charitable we may be I think we must admit that of the three 
divisions of culture,—literature, science, and art, our grandfathers 
had only literature—when they had literature. Science has had 
very hard work in getting anything like one acknowledgment 
from the authorities who direct the education of the upper classes 
in England; and art, as a serious study, seems to be even less 
recognised by them. We very seldom find an English gentleman 
who has the triple education which Goethe gave himself, and 
which, at an earlier period, Leonardo da Vinci gave himself,—in 
literature, science and art. It may even be questioned whether 
people generally are aware that science has claims at all com- 
parable to those of literature, or that art in its turn has claims 
comparable to those of science. My argument in favour of the 
triple education may be compressed into a sentence. Each of 
the three teaches what the other two cannot teach, and opens a 
range of perceptions which the others would leave closed. To 
have the three is ike having three different senses. Literature 
deals best with thought and narrative, science with positive truth, 
and art with the knowledge and the pleasure which are to be 
derived from the perfected use of sight. The three open to us 
three distinct fields of human exertion and they enable us to 
profit by the labours and productions of three distinct orders of 
human genius. It is only quite recently that this has been 
adequately acknowledged or understood. Not only did our im- 
mediate forefathers ignore science and art but they positively 
despised them, with the single exception of mathematical science. 
Even medical studies in spite of their visible utility were not 
