In the Universities, the study of English Classics was not officially recognised at all.

Let us not hastily suppose that this neglect of English rested wholly on unreason, or had nothing to say for itself.  Teachers and tutors of the old Classical Education (as it was called) could plead as follows: 

‘In the first place,’ they would say, ’English Literature is too easy a study.  Our youth, at School or University, starts on his native classics with a liability which in any foreign language he has painfully to acquire.  The voices that murmured around his cradle, the voice of his nurse, of his governess, of the parson on Sundays; the voices of village boys, stablemen, gamekeepers and farmers—­friendly or unfriendly—­of callers, acquaintances, of the children he met at Children’s Parties; the voices that at the dinner-table poured politics or local gossip into the little pitcher with long ears—­all these were English voices speaking in English:  and all these were all the while insensibly leading him up the slope from the summit of which he can survey the promised land spread at his feet as a wide park; and he holds the key of the gates, to enter and take possession.  Whereas,’ the old instructors would continue, ’with the classics of any foreign language we take him at the foot of the steep ascent, spread a table before him (mensa, mensa, mensam ...) and coax or drive him up with variations upon amo, “I love” or [Greek:  tupto], “I beat,” until he, too, reaches the summit and beholds the landscape: 

     But O, what labour! 
     O Prince, what pain!’

Now so much of truth, Gentlemen, as this plea contains was admitted last term by your Senate, in separating the English Tripos, in which a certain linguistic familiarity may be not rashly presumed of the student, from the Foreign Language Triposes, divided into two parts, of which the first will more suspiciously test his capacity to construe the books he professes to have studied.  I may return to this and to the alleged easiness of studies in a School of English.  Let us proceed just now with the reasoned plea for neglect.

These admirable old schoolmasters and dons would have hesitated, maybe, to say flatly with Dogberry that ’to write and read comes by nature ... and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity.’  But in practice their system so worked, and in some of the Public Schools so works to this day.  Let me tell you that just before the war an undergraduate came to me from the Sixth Form of one of the best reputed among these great schools.  He wished to learn to write.  He wished (poor fellow) to write me an essay, if I would set him a subject.  He had never written an essay at school.  ‘Indeed,’ said I, ’and there is no reason why you should, if by “essay” you mean some little treatise about “Patriotism” or “A Day in the Country.”  I will choose you no such subject