The probabilities are that we are now coming to an epoch of a quieter style.  There have been in our generation three strong masters in the aft of prose writing.  There was, first of all, Carlyle, there was Macaulay, and there is Mr. Raskin.  These are all giants, and they have the rights of giants.  But I do not believe that a greater misfortune can befall the students who attend classes here, than that they should strive to write like any one of these three illustrious men.  I think it is the worst thing that can happen to them.  They can never attain to the high mark which they have set before themselves.  It Is not everybody who can bend the bow of Ulysses, and most men only do themselves a mischief by trying to bend it.  If we are now on our way to a quieter style, I am not sorry for it.  Truth is quiet.  Milton’s phrase ever lingers in our minds as one of imperishable beauty—­where he regrets that he is drawn by I know not what, from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.  Moderation and judgment are, for most purposes, more than the flash and the glitter even of the genius.  I hope that your professors of rhetoric will teach you to cultivate that golden art—­the steadfast use of a language in which truth can be told; a speech that is strong by natural force, and not merely effective by declamation; an utterance without trick, without affectation, without mannerisms, without any of that excessive ambition which overleaps itself as disastrously in prose writing as in so many other things.

I will detain you no longer.  I hope that I have made it clear that we conceive the end of education on its literary side to be to make a man and not a cyclopaedia, to make a citizen and not an album of elegant extracts.  Literature does not end with knowledge of forms, with inventories of books and authors, with finding the key of rhythm, with the varying measure of the stanza, or the changes from the involved and sonorous periods of the seventeenth century down to the staccato of the nineteenth, or all the rest of the technicalities of scholarship.  Do not think I contemn these.  They are all good things to know, but they are not ends in themselves.  The intelligent man, says Plato, will prize those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness, and wisdom, and he will less value the others.  Literature is one of the instruments, and one of the most powerful instruments, for forming character for giving us men and women armed with reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with steadfastness and courage, and inspired by that public spirit and public virtue of which it has been well said that they are the brightest ornaments of the mind of man.  Bacon is right, as he generally is, when he bids us read not to contradict and refute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and to consider.  Yes, let us read to weigh and to consider.  In the times before us that