even more and more; the “teaching of literature” has planted a terrible fixed foot in our schools and colleges.  But perhaps the weight usually assigned to this kind of corroboration is rather imaginary.  That a thing has happened does not prove that it ought to have happened, except on a theory of determinism, which puts “conduct” out of sight altogether.  There are those who will still, in the vein of Mephistopheles-Akinetos, urge that the system which gave us the men who pulled us out of the Indian Mutiny can stand comparison with the system which gave France the authors of the debacle; that the successes of Germany over France in war have no necessary connection with education, and those of Germany over England in commerce, diplomacy, &c., still less.  They will even go further—­some of them—­and ask whether the Continental practices and the Arnoldian principles do not necessitate divers terribly large and terribly ill-based assumptions, as that all men are educable, that the value of education is undiminished by its diffusion, that all, or at least most, subjects are capable of being made educational instruments, and a great many more.

On the other hand, they will cheerfully grant that Mr Arnold never succumbed to that senseless belief in examination which has done, and is doing, such infinite harm.  But they will add to the debit side that the account of English university studies which ends the book was even at the time of writing so inaccurate as to be quite incomprehensible, unless we suppose that Mr Arnold was thinking of the days of his own youth, and not of those with complete accuracy.  He says “the examination for the degree of bachelor of arts, which we place at the end of our three years’ university course, is merely the Abiturienten-examen of Germany, the epreuve du baccalaureat of France, placed in both those countries at the entrance to university studies”; and it is by this that he justifies Signer Matteucci’s absurd description of Oxford and Cambridge as hauts lycees Now, in the first place, there is not one single word in this sentence, or in the context, or, so far as I remember, in the whole book, about the Honours system, which for very many years before 1868 had exalted the standard infinitely higher in the case of a very large proportion of men.  And in the second place, there is not a word about the Scholarship system, which in the same way had for very many years provided an entrance standard actually higher—­far higher in some ways—­than the concluding examinations of the French baccalaureat.  My own days at Oxford were from 1863 to 1868, the year of Mr Arnold’s book.  During that time there were always in the university some 400 men who had actually obtained scholarships on this standard; and a very considerable number who had competed on it, and done fairly.  Whether Mr Arnold shared Mark Pattison’s craze about the abolition of the pass-man altogether, I do not know.  But he ought