effect.  What must not an Englishman feel about our deficiencies in this respect, as the sense for beauty, whereof this symmetry is an essential element, awakens and strengthens within him! what will not one day be his respect and desire for Greece and its symmetria prisca, when the scales drop from his eyes as he walks the London streets, and he sees such a lesson in meanness, as the Strand, for instance, in its true deformity!  But here we are coming to our friend Mr. Ruskin’s province, and I will not intrude upon it, for he is its very sufficient guardian.

And so we at last find, it seems, we find flowing in favor of the humanities the natural and necessary stream of things, which seemed against them when we started.  The “hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits,” this good fellow carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters.  Nay, more; we seem finally to be even led to the further conclusion that our hairy ancestor carried in his nature, also, a necessity for Greek.

And, therefore, to say the truth, I cannot really think that humane letters are in much actual danger of being thrust out from their leading place in education, in spite of the array of authorities against them at this moment.  So long as human nature is what it is, their attractions will remain irresistible.  As with Greek, so with letters generally:  they will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more rationally but they will not lose their place.  What will happen will rather be that there will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too many; there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency; but letters will not in the end lose their leading place.  If they lose it for a time, they will get it back again.  We shall be brought back to them by our wants and aspirations.  And a poor humanist may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry, admit the energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and their present favor with the public, to be far greater than his own, and still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on behalf of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science, and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane letters; and so much the more, as they have the more and the greater results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the need in him for beauty.

II.  LITERARY CRITICISM

HEINRICH HEINE[135]

“I know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one day be laid on my coffin.  Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything.  I have never attached any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself very little whether people praise my verses or blame them.  But lay on my coffin a sword; for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity."[136]