PEESIDBNTIAL ADDRESS — SECTION I. 419 



reached an unprecedented excellence. I am certain that a 

 large majority of boys, and of university students too, would 

 form a better conception of the grandeur and beauty of Greek 

 tragedy, and a better knowledge of all that is worth learning 

 about the thought and life of the Greeks and Eomans, by read- 

 ing the best poets, philosophers, and historians quickly in good 

 translations than they now can do by the piecemeal study of 

 single plays and historical extracts. 



The classics have done noble work in the past in dispelling 

 the intellectual darkness of the Middle Ages, in kindling again 

 the lires of imagination, and in giving birth to the critical and 

 historical faculties which have grown to manhood under their 

 care since the Renascence. But it is time now to give the 

 signal for a general advance. I think our age may yet hope 

 to be regarded as the age of a second Renascence, in which 

 men, bursting the shackles of the past, will joyfidly enter into 

 fellowship with the new learning which now stands claiming 

 admission. Formerly the world awakening from its long sleep 

 rushed eagerly into the new knowledge, casting aside some- 

 what rudely and scornfully the barren disputations of the 

 Schoolmen. The hair-splitting problems over which men had 

 wrangled for centuries were by no means solved ; they were 

 simply put aside as being of inferior interest and unprofitable. 

 Printing had then thrown upon the w^estern w^orld the new 

 wealth of ancient literature ; the habit of foreign travel, 

 whether from desire of knowledge, or of gain, or adventure, 

 set men thinking, and made them progressive not only in 

 their manners and customs, but in their thoughts and litera- 

 ture. 



Our own age is probably the most progressive that the 

 world has seen. The inventions of science have introduced into 

 the progress of thought the same rapidity of onward movement 

 as is to be found in the progress of our material comforts. Men 

 travel abroad as they have travelled in no previous age ; the 

 best literature of all countries is circulated at a price which is 

 within the reach of all students, and public libraries ofi'er it 

 gratis to those unable or unwilling to buy. New discoveries 

 and theoiies are flashed by telegraph from one side of the 

 world to the other, iiistead of creeping at snail's pace from 

 country to country in the course of centuries. A master mind 

 like Lord Bacon, a century after Copernicus, only alludes to 

 the new theory of the earth's motion round the sun in order to 

 treat it with scorn, and the majority of Englishmen of his time 

 had probably never heard of it, while in our day discoveries of 

 Professor Koch are in every man's mouth in Australia before 

 he has published the details of them in Berlin. A little book 

 like Bellamy's "Looking Backward," published in America, 

 within a year furnishes subject for discussion in every house 



