r will become a pressing question--What are we going
to do with such a national work of which this country has great reason
to be proud?

The days are gone by when a man was supposed to be educated in
proportion as he was familiar with the literature of Greece and Rome and
ignorant of everything else. Already at Oxford candidates for the
highest honours in the final schools think it no shame to read their
Plato or their Aristotle in English translations, and in half the time
that was needed under the old plan they get a mastery of their
Thucydides or Herodotus, devoting themselves to the subject-matter after
they have proved at 'Moderations' that they have a respectable
acquaintance with the language of the authors.

May the day be far off when Homer and AEschylus shall cease to be read in
the original! The great writers of Hellas and Italy were poets or
orators, great teachers or great thinkers; but they were something more.
They were perfect instrumentalities too. Their thoughts, their lessons,
their aspirations, their regrets, you may interpret and transfer into
the speech and the idioms of the moderns; but the music of their
language, the subtleties of melody and rhythm, and harmony and tone, can
no more be translated than a symphony for the strings can be adequately
represented upon the organ. You may persuade yourself that you have got
the substance; you have missed the perfection of the form. Yet who but a
narrow pedant will insist that the study of any literature, ancient or
modern, is valuable chiefly for familiarizing us with the language, not
for enriching our minds with the subject matter? Do we desire to
understand the past and so to be better able to estimate the importance
of great movements that are going on in the present or, by the help of
the experience of bygone ages, to forecast the future? Then it behoves
us to see that our induction shall be made from as wide a view as may
be, and to avail ourselves of any light that may be gained. But it is
mere waste of time to be for ever staring at the lamp which may be
pretty to look at in itself, but is then most precious when it serves as
a means to an end. If we are ever to construct a Science of History, the
old methods must give place to something which may approximate to
philosophic enquiry. When we come to think of it, how very small an area
of time or space is covered by the historians of Greece and Rome: how
small an area and how superficially dealt