But this enthusiasm, indispensable for the best teaching of anything, is, so to speak, doubly indispensable for even competent teaching of literature.  On the one hand the ulterior objects of the study, of which I have tried to indicate the importance, are of an impalpable kind.  I doubt if there is any subject of the curriculum which it would be so difficult to commend to an uninterested pupil by an appeal to simple utilitarian motives.  On the other hand there clings to literature, and particularly to poetry, which is the quintessence of literature, an air of pleasure-seeking, of holiday, of irresponsibility and detachment from the work-a-day world, which must captivate the student, or else the study itself will seem very poor fooling compared with football or hockey.  If the attitude of the teacher reflects the old question of the Latin Grammar “Why should I teach you letters?” he would better turn to some other subject which his pupils will more easily recognise as appropriate to school hours.

  What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
  That he should weep for her—­

unless indeed he be a candidate for Responsions?

“Ah! it is just as I expected,” says my friend Orbilius at this point:  “this literature-lesson of yours is to be mere play, a ‘soft-option’ for our modern youth, who is not to be made to stand up to the tussle with Latin prose or riders in geometry.”  Softly, my friend!  It is quite true that those twin engines of education, classics and mathematics, are adapted partly by long practice, but partly, as I too believe, by their very nature, to discipline the youthful mind to habits of intellectual honesty, of accuracy, of industry and perseverance.  It is true that they accomplish some of this discipline—­though at what a cost!—­in the hands of indifferent teachers.  It is true that every other subject of the usual curriculum is much more obviously liable than they are to the dangers of idleness, unreality, false pretence; and that the scoffs, for instance, about “playing with test-tubes,” “tracing maps,” “dishing up history notes,” are in fact too often deserved.  But in the first place, if the object to be attained is a worthy one, it is our business to face the dangers of the road, and not to give up the object.  If a knowledge and love of literature is part of the birthright of our children, and a part which, as things are, very many of them will never obtain away from school, then we teachers must strive to give it them, even if the process seems shockingly frivolous to the grammarian or the geometrician.  And, secondly, it is not true that the study of literature, even in the mother tongue, cannot be a discipline and a delight together.  The two are very far from incompatible:  indeed that discipline is most effective which is almost or quite unconsciously self-imposed in the joyous exercise of one’s own faculties.  The genuine footballer and the genuine scholar will both agree with Ferdinand the lover, that