factories of commercial efficiency.  But fear is a treacherous guide.  They are the victims of that abstract generalisation of which I spoke at the outset.  I check their forebodings by reference to concrete personalities, myself, my children, and the hundreds of boys I have known.  And I see more and more plainly, as I study the infinite variety of our mental lineaments and the common stock of human nature and civilised society which unites us, that literature is a permanent and indispensable and even inevitable element in our education; and that moreover it can only have free scope and growth in the expanding personality of the young in a due and therefore a varying harmony with other interests.  I and my children and my schoolboys have eyes and ears and hands—­and even legs!  We have, as Aristotle rightly saw, an appetite for knowledge, and that appetite cannot be satisfied, though it may be choked, by a sole diet of literature.  We have desires of many kinds demanding satisfaction and requiring government.  We have a sense of duty and vocation:  we know that we and our families must eat to live and to carry on the race.  We resent, in our inarticulate way, these sneers at our Philistinism, commercialism, athleticism, materialism, from dim-eyed pedants on the one hand and superior persons on the other, who have evidently forgotten, if they ever saw, the whole purport of that Greek literature the name of which they take in vain.  No! La litterature est une chose qui touche a toutes choses; but if we are to shut our eyes to all the “things” which evoke it, it becomes what it is to so many, whose education has been in name predominantly literary, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

(2) The argument has already insensibly led us to treat by implication the second, and indeed the third of our assumed objects.  But in our modern insistence upon social relations and citizenship—­a very proper insistence, still too much warped and hampered by selfishness and prejudice—­there is a real danger of our forgetting how much of our conscious existence is passed, in a true sense, at leisure and alone.  It is our ideal on the one side to be “all things to all men”:  and for any approach to this ideal, as we have seen, the knowledge and sympathy born of literature are indispensable.  But on the other side no man or woman is completely fitted out without provision for the blank spaces, the passages and waiting rooms, as it were, to say nothing of the actual “recreation rooms” of the house of life.  And there is no provision so abundant, so accessible to all, so permanent, so independent of fortune, and at once so mellowing and fortifying, as literature.  Our happiness or discontent depends far more, than on anything else, on the habitual occupation of our mind when it is free to choose its occupation.  And, since thought is instantaneous, even the busiest of us has far more of that freedom than he knows what to do with unless he has a mental treasury from which