entlemen, to enjoy
it afterwards in other ways and from other aspects; since I hold there is
no surer sign of intellectual ill-breeding than to speak, even to feel,
slightingly of any knowledge oneself does not happen to possess. Still
less do I aim to persuade you that anyone should be able to earn a
Cambridge degree by the process (to borrow Macaulay's phrase) of reading
our great authors 'with his feet on the hob,' a posture I have not even
tried, to recommend it for a contemplative man's recreation. These
editors not only set us the priceless example of learning for learning's
sake: but even in practice they clear our texts for us, and
afterwards--when we go more minutely into our author's acquaintance,
wishing to learn all we can about him--by increasing our knowledge of
detail they enchance our delight. Nay, with certain early writers--say
Chaucer or Dunbar, as with certain highly allusive ones--Bacon, or
Milton, or Sir Thomas Browne--some apparatus must be supplied from the
start. But on the whole I think it a fair contention that such helps to
studying an author are secondary and subsidiary; that, for example, with
any author who by consent is less of his age than for all time, to study
the relation he bore to his age may be important indeed, and even highly
important, yet must in the nature of things be of secondary importance,
not of the first.

But let us examine this principle a little more attentively--for it is
the palmary one. As I conceive it, that understanding of literature which
we desire in our Euphues, our gracefully-minded youth, will include
knowledge in varying degree, yet is itself something distinct from
knowledge. Let us illustrate this upon Poetry, which the most of us will
allow to be the highest form of literary expression, if not of all
artistic expression. Of all the testimony paid to Poetry, none commands
better witness than this--that, as Johnson said of Gray's Elegy 'it
abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with
sentiments to which every heart returns an echo.' When George Eliot said,
'I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I
should like them,' she but repeated of Wordsworth (in homelier, more
familiar fashion) what Johnson said of Gray; and the same testimony lies
implicit in Emerson's fine remark that 'Universal history, the poets, the
romancers'--all good writers, in short--'do not anywhere make us feel
that we intrude, that this is