f children, wanting always more holidays and more sweets.
But I wish my readers to have, and to cherish, the discontent of men and
women.

Therefore I would make men and women discontented, with the divine and
wholesome discontent, at their own physical frame, and at that of their
children. I would accustom their eyes to those precious heirlooms of the
human race, the statues of the old Greeks; to their tender grandeur,
their chaste healthfulness, their unconscious, because perfect, might:
and say--There; these are tokens to you, and to all generations yet
unborn, of what man could be once; of what he can be again if he will
obey those laws of nature which are the voice of God. I would make them
discontented with the ugliness and closeness of their dwellings; I would
make the men discontented with the fashion of their garments, and still
more just now the women, of all ranks, with the fashion of theirs; and
with everything around them which they have the power of improving, if it
be at all ungraceful, superfluous, tawdry, ridiculous, unwholesome. I
would make them discontented with what they call their education, and say
to them--You call the three Royal R's education? They are not education:
no more is the knowledge which would enable you to take the highest
prizes given by the Society of Arts, or any other body. They are not
education: they are only instruction; a necessary groundwork, in an age
like this, for making practical use of your education: but not the
education itself.

And if they asked me, What then education meant? I should point them,
first, I think, to noble old Lilly's noble old 'Euphues,' of three
hundred years ago, and ask them to consider what it says about education,
and especially this passage concerning that mere knowledge which is now-a-
days strangely miscalled education. "There are two principal and
peculiar gifts in the nature of man, knowledge and reason. The one"--that
is reason--"commandeth, and the other"--that is knowledge--"obeyeth.
These things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can change, nor the
deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor
age abolish." And next I should point them to those pages in Mr.
Gladstone's 'Juventus Mundi,' where he describes the ideal training of a
Greek youth in Homer's days; and say,--There: that is an education fit
for a really civilised man, even though he never saw a book in his life;
the full, proportionate, ha