fects our liberties, the knowledge only affects us, if it
inspires us to fresh desire of liberty, whatever liberty may be. It is
even more important to be interested in life than to be interested in
past lives. It was Scott, I think, who asked indignantly,

Lives there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said
This is my own, my native land?

I do not know how it may be in Scotland! Dr. Johnson once said rudely
that the finest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the high road that
might take him to England; but I should think that if Scott's is a
fair test of deadness of soul, there must be a good many people in
England who are as dead as door-nails! The Englishman is not very
imaginative; and a farmer who was accustomed to kneel down like
Antaeus, and kiss the soil of his orchard, would be thought an
eccentric!

Shall we then draw a cynical conclusion from all this, and say that
knowledge is a useless burden; or if we think so, why do we think it?
I have very little doubt in my own mind that why so many young men
despise and even deride knowledge is because knowledge has been
presented to them in so arid a form, so little connected with anything
that concerns them in the remotest degree. We ought, I think, to wind
our way slowly back into the past from the present; we ought to start
with modern problems and modern ideas, and show people how they came
into being; we ought to learn about the world, as it is, first, and
climb the hill slowly. But what we do is to take the history of the
past, Athens and Rome and Judaea, three glowing and shining realms, I
readily admit; but we leave the gaps all unbridged, so that it seems
remote, abstruse, and incomprehensible that men should ever have lived
and thought so.

Then we deluge children with the old languages, not teaching them to
read, but to construe, and cramming the little memories with hideous
grammatical forms. So the whole process of education becomes a dreary
wrestling with the uninteresting and the unattainable; and when we
have broken the neck of infantile curiosity with these uncouth
burdens, we wonder that life becomes a place where the only aim is to
get a good appointment, and play as many games as possible.

Yet learning need not be so cumbrously carried after all! I was
reading a few days ago a little book by Professor Ker, on mediaeval
English, and reading it with a species of rapture. It all came so
freshly and pungently out