122 Selections from Huxley 



literary excellence which exists in the world at the present 

 time. I have said before, and I repeat it here, that if a 

 man cannot get literary culture of the highest kind out of 

 his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and 

 5 Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of 

 our illustrious writers I say, if he cannot get it out of 

 those writers, he cannot get it out of anything; and I 

 would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time 

 of every English child to the careful study of the models 



10 of English writing of such varied and wonderful kind as 

 we possess, and, what is still more important and still 

 more neglected, the habit of using that language with 

 precision, with force, and with art. I fancy we are almost 

 the only nation in the world who seem to think that com- 



15 position comes by nature. The French attend to their 

 own language, the Germans study theirs; but Englishmen 

 do not seem to think it is worth their while. Nor would 

 I fail to include, in the course of study I am sketching, 

 translations of all the best works of antiquity, or of the 



20 modern world. It is a very desirable thing to read Homer 

 in Greek; but if you don't happen to know Greek, the 

 next best thing we can do is to read as good a transla- 

 tion of it as we have recently been furnished with in 

 prose. You won't get all you would get from the original, 



25 but you may get a great deal ; and to refuse to know this 

 great deal because you cannot get all, seems to be as 

 sensible as for a hungry man to refuse bread because 

 he cannot get partridge. Finally, I would add instruc- 

 tion in either music or painting, or, if the child should 



30 be so unhappy, as sometimes happens, as to have no 

 faculty for either of those, and no possibility of doing 

 anything in any artistic sense with them, then I would see 

 what could be done with literature alone; but I would 

 provide, in the fullest sense, for the development of the 



