in.] A LIBERAL EDUCATION. 39 



beauties, and with the grand simplicity of their statement of the 

 everlasting problems of human life, instead of with their verbal 

 and grammatical peculiarities ; I still think it as little proper 

 that they should form the basis of a liberal education for our 

 contemporaries, as I should think it fitting to make that sort of 

 palaeontology with which I am familiar, the back-bone of modern 

 education. 



It is wonderful how close a parallel to classical training could 

 be made out of that palaeontology to which I refer. In the first 

 place I could get up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic 

 in its terminology, so altogether distasteful to the youthful mind, 

 as to beat the recent famous production of the head-masters out 

 of the field in all these excellences. Next, I could exercise my 

 boys upon easy fossils, and bring out all their powers of memory 

 and all their ingenuity in the application of my osteo-grammatical 

 rules to the interpretation, or construing, of those fragments. 

 To those who had reached the higher classes, I might supply 

 odd bones to be built up into animals, giving great honour and 

 reward to him who succeeded in fabricating monsters most 

 entirely in accordance with the rules. That would answer to 

 verse-making and essay-writing in the dead languages. 



To be sure, if a great comparative anatomist were to look at 

 these fabrications he might shake his head, or laugh. But what 

 then ? Would such a catastrophe destroy the parallel ? What, 

 think you, would Cicero, or Horace, say to the production of the 

 best sixth form going ? And would not Terence stop his ears 

 and run out if he could be present at an English performance 

 of his own plays ? Would Hamlet, in the mouths of a set of 

 French actors, who should insist on pronouncing English after 

 the fashion of their own tongue, be more hideously ridiculous ? 



But it will be said that I am forgetting the beauty, and the 

 human interest, which appertain to classical studies. To this I 

 reply that it is only a very strong man who can appreciate the 

 charms of a landscape, as he is toiling up a steep hill, along a 

 bad road. What with short-windedness, stones, ruts, and a 

 pervading sense of the wisdom of rest and be thankful, most of 



