302 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xvii 



ly, that the establishment of professional chairs of philology, 

 under the name of literature, may be a profit to science, but is 

 really a fraud practised upon letters. 



That a young Englishman may be turned out of one of our 

 universities, " epopt and perfect " so far as their system takes 

 him, and yet ignorant of the noble literature which has grown 

 up in those islands during the last three centuries, no less than 

 of the development of the philosophical and political ideas which 

 have most profoundly influenced modern civilisation, is a fact 

 in the history of the nineteenth century which the twentieth 

 will find hard to believe; though, perhaps, it is not more in- 

 credible than our current superstition that whoso wishes to write 

 and speak English well should mould his style after the models 

 furnished by classical antiquity. For my part, I venture to 

 doubt the wisdom of attempting to mould one's style by any other 

 process than that of striving after the clear and forcible expres- 

 sion of definite conceptions ; in which process the Glassian pre- 

 cept, " first catch your definite conceptions,'' is probably the 

 most difficult to obey. But still I mark among distinguished 

 contemporary speakers and writers of English, saturated with 

 antiquity, not a few to whom, it seems to me, the study of 

 Hobbes might have taught dignity; of Swift, concision and 

 clearness ; of Goldsmith and Defoe, simplicity. 



Well, among a hundred young men whose university career 

 is finished, is there one whose attention has ever been directed 

 by his literary instructors to a page of Hobbes, or Swift, or 

 Goldsmith, or Defoe ? In my boyhood we were familiar with 

 Robinson Crusoe, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Gulliver's 

 Travels; and though the mysteries of " Middle English " were 

 hidden from us, my impression is we ran less chance of learning 

 to write and speak the " middling English " of popular orators 

 and headmasters than if we had been perfect in such mysteries 

 and ignorant of those three masterpieces. It has been the fash- 

 ion to decry the eighteenth century, as young fops laugh at their 

 fathers. But we were there in germ; and a "Professor of 

 Eighteenth Century History and Literature " who knew his 

 business might tell young Englishmen more of that which it is 

 profoundly important they should know, but which at present 

 remains hidden from them, than any other instructor; and, in- 

 cidentally, they would learn to know good English when they 

 see or hear it — perhaps even to discriminate between slipshod 

 copiousness and true eloquence, and that alone would be a great 

 srain. 



