THE STUDY OF ENGLISH 223 



" Firstly, that the works of our great English writers are pre- 

 eminently worthy of being systematically studied in our schools 

 and universities as literature ; and secondly, that the establish- 

 ment 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 Englishmen 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 

 these islands during the last three centuries, no less than of the 

 development of the philosophical and political ideas which have 

 most profoundly influenced modern civilization, is a fact in the 

 history of the nineteenth century which the twentieth will find 

 hard to believe ; though, perhaps, it is not more incredible than 

 our current superstition that whoso wishes to write and speak 

 English well should mould his style after the models furnished 

 by classical antiquity. . . . 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 head- 

 masters than if we had been perfect in such mysteries and 

 ignorant of those three masterpieces. It has been the fashion 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, incidentally, 

 they would learn to know good English when they see or 

 hear it — perhaps even to discriminate between slipshod copious- 

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

 gain." 



