A LIBERAL EDUCATION 49 



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 5 

 can show now, as she has been able to show in every generation 

 since civilization spread over the West, individual men who 

 hold their own against the world, and keep alive the old tradi- 

 tion of her intellectual eminence. 



But, in the majority of cases, these men are what they are 10 

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

 of character which will not recognize 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 15 

 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 20 

 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 25 

 mimicry of the measure of a Greek song, or the roll of Cice- 

 ronian prose ! Imagine how much success would be likely to 

 attend the attempt to persuade such men, that the education 

 which leads to perfection in such elegancies is alone to be 

 called culture ; while the facts of history, the process of 30 

 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 ! 



It is not thus that the German universities, from being 



