Hi.] A LIBERAL EDUCATION. 43 



whether he is not compelled to read half a dozen times as many 

 German as English, books ? And whether, of these English 

 books, more than one in ten is the work of a fellow of a college, 

 or a professor of an English university ? 



Is this from any lack of power in the English as compared 

 with the German mind ? The countrymen of Grote and of Mill, 

 of Faraday, of Robert Brown, of Lyell, and of Darwin, to go no 

 further back than the contemporaries of men of middle age, can 

 afford to smile at such a suggestion. England can show now, as 

 she has been able to show in every generation since civiliza 

 tion spread over the West, individual men who hold their own 

 against the world, and keep alive the old tradition of her 

 intellectual eminence. 



But, in the majority of cases, these men are what they are in 

 virtue of their native intellectual force, and of a strength of 

 character which will not recognise impediments. They are not 

 trained in the courts of the Temple of Science, but storm the 

 walls of that edifice in all sorts of irregular ways, and with much 

 loss of time and power, in order to obtain their legitimate 

 positions. 



Our universities not only do not encourage such men ; do not 

 offer them positions, in which it should be their highest duty to 

 do, thoroughly, that which they are most capable of doing ; but, 

 as far as possible, university training shuts out of the minds of 

 those among them, who are Subjected to it, the prospect that 

 there is anything in the world for which they are specially fitted. 

 Imagine the success of the attempt to still the intellectual 

 hunger of any of the men I have mentioned, by putting before 

 him, as the object of existence, the successful mimicry of the 

 measure of a Greek song, or the roll of Ciceronian prose ! 

 Imagine how much success would be likely to attend the attempt 

 to persuade such men, that the education which leads to perfec 

 tion in such elegancies is alone to be called culture ; while the 

 facts of history, the process of thought, the conditions of moral 

 and social existence, and the laws of physical nature are left to 

 be dealt with as they may, by outside barbarians ! 



