PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 1067 
SECTION J. 
MENTAL SCIENCE AND EDUCATION. 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
By Joun Suirtey, B.Sc., District Inspector of Schools, 
Queensland. 
(Delivered Friday, January 7, 1898. ) 
THE INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH HISTORY ON 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
Tue history of England might be represented graphically by an 
irregular wavy line, whose crests would depict years of victory, 
prosperity, and expansion, and whose furrows would show periods 
of loss, of civil conflict, and of depression. If, now, we insert 
dates on these historical summits, it will be found that periods of 
great national success are synchronous with times of great literary 
activity ; and that when the heart of the nation is stirred to its 
depths by threatened peril, only to be successfully avoided by 
mighty effort and sacrifice, a few master-minds of the age, 
unconsciously, and almost Divinely inspired, give tongue, in prose 
or verse, to the joy, or thankfulness, or exaltation, felt by the 
mass of their fellow-countrymen, though inarticulate in all but 
the selected few. Occasionally, the genius is born after the 
national uplifting has ceased, or, still worse, before the nation is 
in excelsis ; but, like the Hebrew prophets of old, when once the 
message has been given, it is delivered, whether in season or out 
of season, whether the outcome be acclamation or persecution. 
Not rarely, in times of misery, the groans of the oppressed are 
voiced in the lamentations of a Piers Plowman, or by the Vow 
Clamantis of a Gower; but the agony, however sincerely expressed, 
is seldom accompanied by talents above mediocrity. Again, both 
in history and literature, there are periods of dull contentment, 
or of national high living, when wit and patriotism are obscured, 
and the Philistine is abroad in the land. 
