That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is
  mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact,

and consenting to this with all my heart I say that it matters very little for the moment, or even for a considerable while, that a pupil does not perfectly, or even nearly, understand all he reads, provided we can get the attraction to seize upon him.  He and the author between them will do the rest:  our function is to communicate and trust.  In what other way do children take the ineffaceable stamp of a gentle nurture than by daily attraction to whatsoever is beautiful and amiable and dignified in their home?  As there, so in their reading, the process must be gradual of acquiring an inbred monitor to reject the evil and choose the good.  For it is the property of masterpieces that they not only raise you to

     despise low joys, low Gains;
     Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains: 

they are not only as Lamb wrote of the Plays of Shakespeare ’enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach you courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity’; but they raise your gorge to defend you from swallowing the fifth-rate, the sham, the fraudulent. Abeunt studia in mores. I cannot, for my part, conceive a man who has once incorporated the “Phaedo” or the “Paradiso” or “Lear” in himself as lending himself for a moment to one or other of the follies plastered in these late stern times upon the firm and most solid purpose of this nation—­the inanities, let us say, of a Baby-Week.  Or, for a more damnable instance, I think of you and me with Marvell’s great Horatian Ode sunk in our minds, standing to-day by the statue of Charles I that looks down Whitehall:  telling ourselves of ’that memorable scene’ before the Banqueting House, remembering amid old woes all the glory of our blood and state, recollecting what is due even to ourselves, standing on the greatest site of our capital, and turning to see it degraded, as it has been for a week, to a vulgar raree-show.  Gentlemen, I could read you many poor ill-written letters from mothers whose sons have died for England, to prove to you we have not deserved that, or the sort of placard with which London has been plastered,

     Dum domus AEneae Capitoli immobile saxum
     Accolet.

Great enterprises (as we know) and little minds go ill together.  Someone veiled the statue.  That, at least, was well done.

I have not the information—­nor do I want it—­to make even a guess who was responsible for this particular outrage.  I know the sort of man well enough to venture that he never had a liberal education, and, further, that he is probably rather proud of it.  But he may nevertheless own some instinct of primitive kindliness:  and I wish he could know how he afflicts men of sensitiveness who have sons at the War.