university dons, the question was mixed up with a quite different one: Can Literature be examined on? "Chatter about Shelley and Harriet "-this was the description of the essays that would be sent up for degrees. There is much truth in the criticism which the bitter phrase would convey. I think that literature can never be an examination subject; and if it could, it ought not to be so degraded. But it certainly can be taught taught in the Infant school, and in the High school, and in the University, and all through life. Nor should any curriculum for an Arts degree be held to be adequate which does not include attendance on a course of literary history and criticism, as is the case in the Scottish Universities.

The man who doubts whether literature can be taught must have strange notions of the meaning of the word teaching. Is it not one of the pleasantest occupations in the world to read a good piece of prose or poetry with a young and ardent mind, and, by dwelling on its true meaning and its beauties, to introduce that mind to the humanities and thereby raise higher the plane of his daily life-spiritualizing him by humanizing him? Why then is it not done? The answer perhaps is, because it is very difficult to do. The teacher who will do the work successfully must be himself a man of humane culture, and of sympathy with the nascent and adolescent life of mind. If some so endowed have notwithstanding failed, it is because the foundations in the minds of their pupils, as I have said, have never been laid: the way has not been prepared. As summer is waning and autumn approaches, you hurry on with a view to a harvest, not only in literature,

but in all that pertains to the spiritual life. You forgot to break up the soil in early spring, and to sow the seed, and to harrow. The warm summer sun consequently played ineffectually on a hard surface, and if anything has been produced at all, as will certainly be the case where the native qualities of the soil are worth anything, it is weeds or wild oats.

If you think it necessary in the later years of the secondary school to give some instruction in the history of literature, you will give it in connexion with the history of your country. You will give the minimum number of dates and the maximum of inner logical connexions. When this is done, the reading of a narrative of English literature will at least do no harm. But read an author before you read about him; "Matter before Form."

Is it not the fact that the general result of all our education is that boys and girls, youths and maidens, do not as a rule, even after they have grown up, read anything except narratives of events, real or imaginary, which have a power of exciting the mind, like wine or gin? They care also, perhaps, for accounts of proposals that affect their own immediate material well-being. As regards literature, they are barbarians. Listen to the drawing-room songs that are sung and applauded. Are our upper classes-the pure product of the great Public Schools-really above the level of the Music Saloon? No use complaining of this; so it will be to the end of time, as regards a section of every population. But if an enjoyment of literature and a genuine interest in the beauties of various nature be the marks of a cultivated mind, then the culture and civilization

of a nation may be fairly measured by the proportion of the population who love literature and who have an open mind for the show of things, and the moral meaning of the world. This-not Latin and Greek-is the Humanities; Latin and Greek are the Humanities only in so far as they are this, and no further. As educationists, our duty is to increase the proportion of those so humanized in each successive generation; and this, because the ethical life of a people is largely determined by their interest in such things. And I venture to affirm that, in the sphere of religion and morality, nothing can so surely promote and sustain purity of feeling, reasonableness of opinion, and elevation of standard, as love of literature and a feeling for

nature.

The extent to which such great results are attainable in the school depends on the conception which the teacher forms of his spiritual function, and the methods by which he gives effect to his conception. Let it not be supposed that I advocate the undue fostering of the emotional and ideal in youth. I merely wish to satisfy and direct what God has given. No man is more profoundly convinced than I am that the education of the human spirit is not completed when it is merely permeated by feeling and elevated by emotion. Reason, whose function it is to raise into the sphere of absoluteness and duty the ideal teachings of emotion, must be exercised and strengthened. The heart has to be subdued by the intellect, life and its purposes have to be rationalized by each for himself, and the vagueness of sentiment has to become the certitude of the science of conduct. Law must regulate and govern emotion,

but it is law within the sphere of emotion, and does not supersede it.

I have now dealt, as briefly as I could, with language in the school in its concrete, its formal, and its literary aspects. It is the mother-tongue of which I have been speaking, and I hope I have made it clear that no subject, or combination of subjects, approaches the mother-tongue as an educational instrument. It is the centre round which the life of every earnest mind revolves it is the soil in which alone it can truly live; and so also, and I may say therefore, it is and must be the centre round which all true education of the young mind must revolve, the soil into which every growing mind must strike its roots deep, if its growth is to be vigorous, native, national and humane.

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I will now speak of foreign tongues and the method of teaching them, taking Latin as type.

LECTURE VII.

FOREIGN LANGUAGES-LATIN AS TYPE.

I HAVE already shown you that the best culture which a man receives through language is to be obtained only through his mother-tongue. While he seems to be deriving culture from a foreign language, it is in fact chiefly from the comparisons, similarities, contrasts of the forms of thought and expression in that language with the forms already familiar to him, that he receives intellectual and moral benefit and a finer æsthetic perception. The foreign tongue, accordingly, will be of substantial advantage in his education, apart from its practical uses, only in so far as he, more or less consciously, transmutes its forms, its thought, its images, its delicacies into the familiar vernacular which is, and must always be, the vesture and expression of his own inner life. Language, as I have frequently said, is a necessity for the growth of mind. Growth depends on finding fit utterance for those complex mental states which succeed each other in the history of the race and of the individual, and are ever deepening their significance and widening their range. If the form or mould into which each man's mental life runs, and by means of which he feels and thinks as a self-conscious being, be