82 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 



with incidental geography, not as a mere chronicle of 

 reigns and battles, but as a chapter in the development 

 of the race, and the history of civilisation. 



Then with respect to aesthetic knowledge and disci- 

 pline, we have happily in the English language one of 

 the most magnificent storehouses of artistic beauty and 

 of models of 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 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 of English writ- 

 ing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, 

 and, what is still more important and still more neg- 

 lected, 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 composition 

 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 sketch- 

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

 the 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 translation of it as we have recently been furnished 

 with in prose. You won't get all you would get from the 

 original, 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 



