Therefore, when we are told of sophomores who place Shakespeare in the twelfth, and Dickens in the seventeenth century, who are under the impression that “Don Quixote” flowed from the fertile pen of Mr. Marion Crawford, and who are not aware that a gentleman named James Boswell wrote a most entertaining life of another gentleman named Samuel Johnson, we need not lift up horror-stricken hands to Heaven, but call to mind how many other things there are in this world to know.  That a girl student should mistake “Launcelot Gobbo” for King Arthur’s knight is not a matter of surprise to one who remembers how three young men, graduates of the oldest and proudest colleges in the land, placidly confessed ignorance of “Petruchio.”  Shakespeare, after all, belongs to “the realms of gold.”  The higher education, as now understood, permits the student to escape him, and to escape the Bible as well.  As a consequence of these exemptions, a bachelor of arts may be, and often is, unable to meet his intellectual equals with mental ease.  Allusions that have passed into the common vocabulary of cultivated men and women have no meaning for him.  Does not Mr. Andrew Lang tell us of an Oxford student who wanted to know what people meant when they said “hankering after the flesh-pots of Egypt”; and has not the present writer been asked by a Harvard graduate if she could remember a Joseph, “somewhere” in the Old Testament, who was “decoyed into Egypt by a coat of many colours”?

To measure any form of schooling by its direct results is to narrow a wide issue to insignificance.  The by-products of education are the things which count.  It has been said by an admirable educator that the direct results obtained from Eton and Rugby are a few copies of indifferent Latin verse; the by-products are the young men who run the Indian Empire.  We may be startled for a moment by discovering a student of political economy to be wholly and happily ignorant of Mr. Lloyd-George’s “Budget,” the most vivid object-lesson of our day; but how many Americans who talked about the budget, and had impassioned views on the subject, knew what it really contained?  If the student’s intelligence is so trained that she has some adequate grasp of economics, if she has been lifted once and forever out of the Robin Hood school of political economy, which is so dear to a woman’s generous heart, it matters little how early or how late she becomes acquainted with the history of her own time.  “Depend upon it,” said the wise Dr. Johnson, whom undergraduates are sometimes wont to slight, “no woman was ever the worse for sense and knowledge.”  It was his habit to rest a superstructure on foundations.