the methods of classical study may be expected at the universities. I suppose that the Cambridge system, if worked with reasonable flexibility, would allow of all the freedom that is desirable. But at Oxford the claims of the examinations, for which a definite set of books is prescribed, are so exacting as practically to leave no room for lectures in the higher scholarship. I am not complaining of the main principle on which the Oxford final examination is based; there is no hardship, there are even great advantages, in compelling a classical student to read Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Thucydides. A prescription of this kind acts as a check upon vagaries, and secures to the student a thorough knowledge of important books. But the demands of the examination should not be, as they are at present, so rigid as to leave no time for the formation of voluntary classes in which instruction might be given in the rudiments of criticism. Such classes would in all probability never be large, nor would they attract the ablest among the students. But they would provide, it may fairly be said, for the wants of a reasonable number of men with a taste for criticism and a capacity for contributing something original towards it, who now are left almost entirely without guidance. In these voluntary classes tutors might give a general introduction to the principles of philological evidence, whether derived from manuscripts or inscriptions, using manuscripts, where such are available, for illustration (even inferior manuscripts would be very serviceable in this way where good ones are not accessible); or the student might be taken carefully through some great work of criticism such as Bentley's Horace or Manilius, or Madvig's De Finibus, the tutor calling special attention to the method of the critic, its strong and its weak points; or some important period in the history of scholarship (a subject almost entirely ignored by Oxford men) might be studied.

No such distinction should be drawn between the form and the matter of classical writings as is now drawn at Oxford,

where the students are taken first through a preliminary course of poetry and oratory, and are afterwards introduced to the historians and philosophers, reading, for instance, for the first public examination Demosthenes and Cicero and Homer and Virgil, and for the second Thucydides and Livy and Aristotle and Plato. This arrangement not only makes the first year of the student's Oxford life a mere continuation of his school work, but prevents him from taking any view of classical literature as a whole.

The comparative study of languages should be begun at the universities not (as now at Oxford) by the reading of compendia or notes from lectures, but by learning the rudiments of Sanskrit.

Students of philology, after they have completed their university course, should be invited by the professors to co-operate with them in original work, or to undertake original work of their own. Or they should at least be directed how to set about such work, if it be their wish to undertake it.

Suggestions of this kind (and there are doubtless many others which will occur to minds more fertile than my own) might be acted upon without materially modifying the principles on which the course of studies at our universities is based. They require for their application no more than an increased elasticity in the examination system, with which, in its main features, I should not propose to interfere. I suppose that the demands of the examinations are nowhere more rigorous than at Oxford; but even there, if the mass of compulsory work were diminished, and a real freedom given to learn and to teach subjects falling outside the prescribed course, there would be little difficulty in communicating, to those interested in the matter, the elements of philological method, and removing from the Oxford system what no one interested in classical antiquity can but regard as a glaring defect. I am pleading for a kind of instruction with which I suppose all serious teachers and students of the natural sciences to be familiar, and which is indeed

inseparable from the progressive pursuit of any branch of knowledge whatever.

Classical study can maintain itself as a living element of knowledge, but not as a patchwork of accomplishments. The revival of learning in England requires the aid not of genius, but of ordinary ability and good will. Singleness of aim among even a few like-minded persons can accomplish much, and it is to be hoped that the importance of research to education, its efficacy in strengthening the individual character of the student, and the general indirect influence of learning in preventing the degeneration of literature, will soon be recognized not by a few but by many. In resources of all kinds, endowments, leisure, opportunities, our universities are exceptionally rich. Much has been done to remove the old restrictions which prevented free access to these resources; the duty remains of employing them fruitfully, and adding a new element of well-being to the national life of England.

VIII.

THE MORAL INFLUENCE OF

LITERATURE1.

IN choosing this subject for an evening lecture, I need hardly say that I had no thought of attempting to exhaust it; still less did I suppose that I had anything new to say. An hour is a very short time to give to a great subject on which much has already been said and written. On the other hand, a great subject has this advantage over a small one, that it invites more attention and stimulates more interest, and thus the points to which one can attract notice in a short time are more likely to remain in the memory, and suggest reflection afterwards.

(1) It is hardly superfluous to ask-What is literature? We are apt to think of literature as the contents of books, and books as an affair of ink and paper, half, if not altogether, dead; something removed from the real life of the world. And no doubt it is true that a mere knowledge of books is not the same as a knowledge of life and of the world; it is not the same thing, and it is a very inadequate substitute for it. But look at the matter a little more closely, and one sees that the line is drawn too rigidly. For books are, after all, nothing more or less than voices speaking to us-not the voices merely of our own friends and contemporaries, but of a long line of past

1 [A Lecture delivered at Toynbee Hall, October, 1889: published, with Essay IX, by Percival & Co., London, 1890.]

generations; human life that has escaped the grave, still appealing to us for our homage, our love, our sympathy, our condemnation, or our abhorrence. Literature is a voice; and what is there that its message does not contain if we will listen?

But we must add a word more Literature is the voice of those who can speak. The addition means something. The writer of books is one who has the gift of utterance. Not by any means, on that account, a greater or better man than his fellows; for some of the greatest men---Socrates, for instance, and Cromwell-were comparatively inarticulate, and thousands of others who have taken a great part in making social and political history have died without leaving a word behind them. There is a great deal of life which never finds its way into books or speeches at all. But the gift of utterance is a special talent, sometimes associated with greater qualities, sometimes not so; sometimes even bound up with mean qualities, and depending apparently on a defect of moral nature. Great powers of imagination are usually connected with great powers of expression; but imaginative genius, as every one knows, does not always carry with it what is generally, understood to be a sound moral constitution.

Literature, then, being, in its length and breadth, the voice of those who are more able to speak addressing those who are less able, the moral effect of their message must depend on what they have to say; and this, again, must depend on the moral force that is in them, and the degree in which it has moved them to speak. Their gift of utterance may be inseparably linked with some weakness or defect of nature; and thus it may happen-indeed, very often it does happen - that the literature of a particular generation gives but an inadequate idea of the best part of its life.

(2) We are talking, somewhat too glibly perhaps, about morality and moral force. So, at the risk of being tedious, I must define the sense in which I am going to use the words in this lecture. I will say then at once that by morality I do