work, and with a firm resolve to extract what amusement they can out of life.  All that is, I feel, perfectly true; but there is little demand on the part of parents that boys should have intellectual interests or enthusiasms for the things of the mind.  What teachers ought to aim at is to communicate something of this enthusiasm, by devising a form of education which should appeal to the simpler forms of intellectual curiosity, instead of starving boys upon an ideal of inaccessible dignity.  I do not for a moment deny that those who defend the old classical tradition have a high intellectual ideal.  But it is an unpractical ideal, and takes no account of the plain facts of experience.

The result is that we teachers have forfeited confidence; and we must somehow or other regain it.  We are tolerated, as all ancient and respectable things are tolerated.  We have become a part of the social order, and we have still the prestige of wealth and dignity.  But what wealthy people ever dream nowadays of building and endowing colleges on purely literary lines?  All the buildings which have arisen of late in my University are either buildings for scientific purposes or clerical foundations for ecclesiastical ends.  The vitality of our literary education is slowly fading out of it.  This lack of vitality is not so evident until you go a little way beneath the surface.  Classical proficiency is still liberally rewarded by scholarships and fellowships; and while the classical tradition remains in our schools, there are a good many men, who intend to be teachers, who enter for classical examinations.  But where we fail grievously is in our provision for average men; they are provided with feeble examinations in desultory and diffuse subjects, in which a high standard is not required.  It is difficult to imagine a condition of greater vacuity than that in which a man leaves the University after taking a pass degree.  No one has endeavoured to do anything for him, or to cultivate his intelligence in any line.  And yet these are our parents in the next generation.  And the only way in which we stifle mental revolt is by leaving our victims in such a condition of mental abjectness and intellectual humility, that it does not even occur to them to complain of how unjustly they have been treated.  After all, we have interfered with them so little that they have contrived to have a good time at the University.  They have made friends, played games, and lived a healthy life enough; they resolve that their boys shall have a good time too, if possible; and so the poor educational farce is played on from generation to generation.  It is melancholy to read the sonnet which Tennyson wrote, more than sixty years ago, a grave and bitter indictment of Cambridge—­

            “Because you do profess to teach,
     And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.”