common prudence and morality, and more, you shall be taught them:  all we ask of you is to be patient and humble; believe us, you will never really appreciate these writers, you will not even rationally enjoy their beauties, unless you submit to a course of intellectual training like that through which most of them have passed, and through which certainly this nation which produced them has passed, in the successive stages of its growth.”

The best method, I think, of working out these principles would be to devote a few lectures in the last term of every complete course, to the examination of some select works of recent writers, chosen under the sanction of the Educational Committee.  But I must plead for whole works.  “Extracts” and “Select Beauties” are about as practical as the worthy in the old story, who, wishing to sell his house, brought one of the bricks to market as a specimen.  It is equally unfair on the author and on the pupil; for it is impossible to show the merits or demerits of a work of art, even to explain the truth or falsehood of any particular passage, except by viewing the book as an organic whole.  And as for the fear of raising a desire to read more of an author than may be proper—­when a work has once been pointed out as really hurtful, the rest must be left to the best safeguard which I have yet discovered, in man or woman—­the pupil’s own honour.

Such a knowledge of English literature would tend no less, I think, to the spread of healthy historic views among us.  The literature of every nation is its autobiography.  Even in its most complex and artistic forms, it is still a wonderfully artless and unconscious record of its doubts and its faith, its sorrows and its triumphs, at each era of its existence.  Wonderfully artless and correct—­because all utterances which were not faithful to their time, which did not touch some sympathetic chord in their heart’s souls, are pretty sure to have been swept out into wholesome oblivion, and only the most genuine and earnest left behind for posterity.  The history of England indeed is the literature of England—­but one very different from any school history or other now in vogue.  You will find it neither a mere list of acts of parliament and record-office, like some; nor yet an antiquarian gallery of costumes and armour, like others; nor a mere war-gazette and report of killed and wounded from time to time; least of all not a “Debrett’s Peerage,” and catalogue of kings and queens (whose names are given, while their souls are ignored), but a true spiritual history of England—­a picture of the spirits of our old forefathers, who worked, and fought, and sorrowed, and died for us; on whose accumulated labours we now here stand. That I call a history—­not of one class of offices or events, but of the living human souls of English men and English women.  And therefore one most adapted to the mind of woman; one which will call into fullest exercise her blessed faculty of sympathy,