nations of minds that are
otherwise cut off from us; and not merely minds mirrored in books, but
more especially those of human beings as given in speech.

This is all very familiar, I only mention it because it is a special case
of a wider question, namely: How much can be safely poured into a
receptive child which he will be thankful for as he gets older? I mean,
rather: What is the proportion that ought to be maintained between
learning to reason, _e.g._, Euclid; exercising the attentive faculties,
_e.g._, in plodding through a Latin book with a dictionary; and the more
or less mechanical acquirement, as in learning by heart? Why was I not
taught addition by memorising tables as in the case of multiplication?
It could have been built into the structure of my mind equally well, and
would have saved much misery. It is, of course, essential that what is
learned should be true. I have heard a credibly attested story of a
dame-school at the beginning of last century, where class and teacher
were heard chanting together: Twice 1 is 2, twice 2 is 3, twice 3 is 4,
etc.

I certainly believe in learning by heart, and I am grateful for having
learned many dates at school; most of them are forgotten, but enough to
be of some use are retained. The worst of it is that I am as likely to
know the date of the Flood as that of the Fire of London, and of the
battle of Arbela as that of Worcester.

I am also grateful for having been made to learn Shakespeare by heart,
although we had to do it before breakfast. I do not imagine that I now
remember any of it, but it gave me some idea of the beauty of literature,
which I hardly gained at all from the classics. It also started me
reading Shakespeare out of school. I believe this is the easiest way of
supplying some modicum of literature to a boy who cannot get it out of
Latin and Greek. And a kind of Cowper-Temple Shakespeare, without note
or comment, is more effective than regular so-called literary lessons,
and the worrying of boys about the metre or the difference between a hawk
and a handsaw. A boy does not want to understand everything, and he
likes to get his poetry in a book which looks as if it were meant for
reading, not for cramming or for holiday tasks.

Personally, I also resent that I was not taught at school to read music
by the sol-fa system, which is another of the things that can be poured
into most children not only easily but with pleasure to themselves. I