Those who are possessed, and desire to see others possessed, by that conception of literary study must watch with the greatest sympathy and admiration the efforts of those who are striving so hard, and, I hope, so successfully, to bring the systematic and methodical study of our own literature, in connection with other literatures, among subjects for teaching and examination in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.  I regard those efforts with the liveliest interest and sympathy.  Everybody agrees that an educated man ought to have a general notion of the course of the great outward events of European history.  So, too, an educated man ought to have a general notion of the course of all those inward thoughts and moods which find their expression in literature.  I think that in cultivating the study of literature, as I have perhaps too laboriously endeavoured to define it, you will be cultivating the most important side of history.  Knowledge of it gives stability and substance to character.  It furnishes a view of the ground we stand on.  It builds up a solid backing of precedent and experience.  It teaches us where we are.  It protects us against imposture and surprise.

Before closing I should like to say one word upon the practice of composition.  I have suffered, by the chance of life, many things from the practice of composition.  It has been my lot, I suppose, to read more unpublished work than any one else in this room.

There is an idea, and, I venture to think, a very mistaken idea, that you cannot have a taste for literature unless you are yourself an author.  I make bold entirely to demur to that proposition.  It is practically most mischievous, and leads scores and even hundreds of people to waste their time in the most unprofitable manner that the wit of man can devise, on work in which they can no more achieve even the most moderate excellence than they can compose a Ninth Symphony or paint a Transfiguration.  It Is a terrible error to suppose that because one is happily able to relish “Wordsworth’s solemn-thoughted idyll, or Tennyson’s enchanted reverie,” therefore a solemn mission calls you to run off to write bad verse at the Lakes or the Isle of Wight.  I beseech you not all to turn to authorship.  I will even venture, with all respect to those who are teachers of literature, to doubt the excellence and utility of the practice of over-much essay-writing and composition.  I have very little faith in rules of style, though I have an unbounded faith in the virtue of cultivating direct and precise expression.  But you must carry on the operation inside the mind, and not merely by practising literary deportment on paper.  It is not everybody who can command the mighty rhythm of the greatest masters of human speech.  But every one can make reasonably sure that he knows what he means, and whether he has found the right word.  These are internal operations, and are not forwarded by writing for writing’s sake.