ade to draw, more or less well.
Do not misapprehend me. I do not say for one moment you would make an
artistic draughtsman. Artists are not made; they grow. You may improve
the natural faculty in that direction, but you cannot make it; but you
can teach simple drawing, and you will find it an implement of learning
of extreme value. I do not think its value can be exaggerated, because
it gives you the means of training the young in attention and accuracy,
which are the two things in which all mankind are more deficient than in
any other mental quality whatever. The whole of my life has been spent
in trying to give my proper attention to things and to be accurate, and
I have not succeeded as well as I could wish; and other people, I am
afraid, are not much more fortunate. You cannot begin this habit too
early, and I consider there is nothing of so great a value as the habit
of drawing, to secure those two desirable ends.

Then we come to the subject-matter, whether scientific or aesthetic, of
education, and I should naturally have no question at all about teaching
the elements of physical science of the kind I have sketched, in a
practical manner; but among scientific topics, using the word scientific
in the broadest sense, I would also include the elements of the theory
of morals and of that of political and social life, which, strangely
enough, it never seems to occur to anybody to teach a child. I would
have the history of our own country, and of all the influences which
have been brought to bear upon it, with incidental geography, not as
a mere chronicle of reigns and battles, but as a chapter in the
development of the race, and the history of civilisation.

Then with respect to aesthetic knowledge and discipline, we have happily
in the English language one of the most magnificent storehouses of
artistic beauty and of models of literary excellence which exists in
the world at the present time. I have said before, and I repeat it here,
that if a man cannot get literary culture of the highest kind out of
his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes,[81] and
Bishop Berkeley,[82] to mention only a few of our illustrious writers--I
say, if he cannot get it out of those writers he cannot get it out of
anything; and I would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time
of every English child to the careful study of the models of English
writing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what