12 INTRODUCTION. 



should occupy our thoughts, the aims we should follow, 

 the principles and methods which we should make use of. 

 The bulk and substance of this they indeed inherited them- 

 selves; but the finer distinctions of their reasoning, the 

 delicate shading of their feelings and aspirations, they 

 added and modified for themselves, modelling for their own 

 special use the pliable and elastic medium of the mother 

 tongue. With this finer moulding we have inherited the 

 spirit of the former generation : predisposing us to certain 

 phases of thought and placing in our path a difficulty in 

 acquiring otherwise than by gradual and almost imper- 

 ceptible degrees the faculty of assimilating new and un- 

 expected opinions, tastes, and feelings. Many of us adhere 

 to the special character and phase of thought acquired 

 in our youth. Some by learning foreign languages, and 

 living in other countries, gain a facility for understanding 

 quite different phases of thought: very few among us 

 10. develop so much original thought that they burst the 



Inadequacy r * 



ofconven- shell of conventional speech, coining new words and ex- 



tional 



or?ginai for pressions for themselves, embodying in them the fleeting 

 cotahlgof ideas of their time, the indefinable spirit of their age. 

 Once expressed, these new terms are rapidly circulated, 

 and if we look back on the period of a generation, we note 

 easily the progress and development of opinion and tastes 

 in the altered terms and style of our language. 



Thus it is that the writer, and those of his readers 

 whose memory carries them back to the middle of the cen- 

 tury, and whose schooling and education embodied the 

 ideas of a generation before that time, can claim to have 

 some personal knowledge of the greater portion of the 

 nineteenth century, of the interests which it created and 



