180 SCIENCE AND ART AND EDUCATION vil 



select which will combine all the needful elements 

 in such due proportion as to give the greatest 

 amount of food, support, and encouragement 

 to those faculties which enable us to appreciate 

 truth, and to profit by those sources of innocent 

 happiness which are open to us, and, at the same 

 time, to avoid that which is bad, and coarse, and 

 ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls 

 and dangers which beset those who break through 

 the natural or moral laws. 



I address myself, in this spirit, to the considera- 

 tion of the question of the value of purely literary 

 education. Is it good and sufficient, or is it 

 insufficient and bad ? Well, here I venture to 

 say that there are literary educations and literary 

 educations. If I am to understand by that term 

 the education that was current in the great 

 majority of middle-class schools, and upper schools 

 too, in this country when I was a boy, and which 

 consisted absolutely and almost entirely in keeping 

 boys for eight or ten years at learning the rules of 

 Latin and Greek grammar, construing certain 

 Latin and Greek authors, and possibly making 

 verses which, had they been English verses, 

 would have been condemned as abominable 

 doggerel, if that is what you mean by liberal 

 education, then I say it is scandalously insufficient 

 and almost worthless. My reason for saying so 

 is not from the point of view of science at all, but 

 from the point of view of literature. I say the 



