they are said right or wrong, but to take a text and show what the passage means to the world, to reconstruct the scene and the conditions in which it was written, to show the origins and the fruits of ideas or of discoveries, demand qualities of a very different order.  The plea for thoroughness may no doubt be offered in perfect sincerity.  There are plenty of men, especially among those who desire the office of a pedagogue, whose field of vision is constricted to a slit.  If they were painters their work would be in the slang of the day, “tight.”  One small group of facts they see hard and sharp, without atmosphere or value.  Their own knowledge having no capacity for extension, no width or relationship to the world at large, they cannot imagine that breadth in itself may be a merit.  Adepts in a petty erudition without vital antecedents or consequences, they would willingly see the world shrivel to the dimensions of their own landscape.

Anticipating here the applause of the reforming party, to avoid misapprehension let it be expressly observed that pedantry of this sort is in no sense the special prerogative of teachers of classics.  We meet it everywhere.  Among teachers of science the type abounds, and from the papers set in any Natural Sciences Tripos, not to speak of scholarship examinations of every kind, it would be possible to extract question after question that ought never to have been set, referring to things that need never have been taught, and knowledge that no one but a pedant would dream of carrying in his head for a week.

The splendid purpose which science serves is the inculcation of principle and balance, not facts.  There is something horrible and terrifying in the doctrine so often preached, reiterated of course by speaker after speaker at the “Neglect of Science” meeting, that science is to be preferred because of its utility.  If the choice were really between dead classics and dead science, or if science is to be vivified by an infusion of commercial, utilitarian spirit, then a thousand times rather let us keep to the classics as the staple of education.  They at least have no “use.”  At least they hold the keys to the glorious places, to the fulness of literature and to the thoughtful speech of all kindred nations, nor are they demeaned with sordid, shop-keeper utility.  This was plainly in the mind of the Poet Laureate, who speaking at the meeting I have referred to, said well that “a merely utilitarian science can never win the spiritual respect of mankind.”  The main objection that the humanists make to the introduction of natural science as a necessary subject of education, is, he declared, that science is not spiritual, that it does not work in the sphere of ideas.  He went on very properly to show how perverse is such a representation of science, but, alas, in further recommendation of science as a safe subject of instruction he added that the antagonism of science to religion is ended, and that the contest