172 SELECTED ESSAYS FROM LAY SERMONS 



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 

 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 wdth 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 sketching, 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 h?^pe i 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 because he 

 cannot get partridge. Finally, I would add instruction in 

 either music or painting, or, if the child should be so un- 

 happy, 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 aesthetic side of the 

 mind. In my judgment, those are all the essentials of 

 education for an English child. With that outfit, such as 

 it might be made in the time given to education which is 



