With regard to the special evil of teaching poetry by “selections” or “extracts,” he wrote in his Report for 1880:  “That the poetry chosen should have real beauties of expression and feeling, that these beauties should be such as the children’s hearts and minds can lay hold of, and that a distinct point or centre of beauty and interest should occur within the limits of the passage learned—­all these are conditions to be insisted on.  Some of the short pieces by Mrs. Hemans, such as ’The Graves of a Household,’ ‘The Homes of England,’ ‘The Better Land,’ are to be recommended because they fulfil all three conditions; they have real merits of expression and sentiment; the merits are such as the children can feel, and the centre of interest, these pieces being so short, necessarily occurs within the limits of what is learnt.  On the other hand, in extracts taken from Scott or Shakespeare, the point of interest is not often reached within the hundred lines which is all that children in the Fourth Standard learn.  The Judgment Scene in the Merchant of Venice affords me a good example of what I mean....  The children in the Fourth Standard begin at the beginning and stop at the end of a hundred lines.  Now the children in the Fourth Standard are often a majority of the children learning poetry, and this is all their poetry for the year.  But within these hundred lines the real interest of the situation is not reached; neither do they contain any poetry of signal beauty and effectiveness.  How little, therefore, has the poetry-exercise been made to do for these children, many of whom will leave school at once, and learn no more poetry!” He greatly favoured all such exercises as tend to make the mind “creative,” and give it “a native play of its own, as against such exercises as learning strings of promontories, battles, and minerals.”  As to the number of subjects taught, he was in favour of few rather than many.  He dreaded for the children the strain of having to receive a large number of “knowledges” (as he oddly called them), and “store them up to be reproduced in an examination.”  But in spite of this well-founded dread of an undue multiplication of subjects, he wished to make Latin compulsory in the upper standards of elementary schools, and he wished to see it taught through the Vulgate.  Perhaps in this particular he showed an effect of his father’s influence; for the late Dean of Westminster[19] used to imitate the enormous emphasis with which Dr. Arnold replied to some one who had depreciated the language of the Vulgate as “Dog Latin”—­“Dog Latin, indeed!  I call it Lion Latin!”

Be that as it may, Matthew Arnold thus gave his judgment on the possible uses of the Vulgate in elementary schools—­