ON SCIENCE AND ART 157 



mental quality whatever. The whole of my life has 

 been spent in trying to give my proper attention to 

 things and to be accurate, and I have not succeeded as 

 well as I could wish; and other people, I am afraid, are 

 not much more fortunate. You cannot begin this habit 

 too early, and I consider there is nothing of so great a 

 value as the habit of drawing, to secure those two de- 

 sirable ends. 



Then we come to the subject-matter, whether scien- 

 tific or aesthetic, of education, and I should naturally 

 have no question at all about teaching the elements of 

 physical science of the kind I have sketched, in a prac- 

 tical manner; but among scientific topics, using the 

 word scientific in the broadest sense, I would also in- 

 clude the elements of the theory of morals and of that 

 of political and social life, which, strangely enough, it 

 never seems to occur to anybody to teach a child. I 

 would have the history of our own country, and of all 

 the influences which have been brought to bear upon it, 

 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 Shakes- 

 peare, 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 



