for our betters. Rather it is true that, in
their greatest strokes, there we feel most at home.' The mass of
evidence, of which these are samples, may be summarised thus:--As we
dwell here between two mysteries, of a soul within and an ordered
Universe without, so among us are granted to dwell certain men of more
delicate intellectual fibre than their fellows--men whose minds have, as
it were, filaments to intercept, apprehend, conduct, translate home to us
stray messages between these two mysteries, as modern telegraphy has
learnt to search out, snatch, gather home human messages astray over
waste waters of the Ocean.

If, then, the ordinary man be done this service by the poet, that (as Dr
Johnson defines it) 'he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but
he feels it _with a great increase of sensibility_'; or even if, though
the message be unfamiliar, it suggests to us, in Wordsworth's phrase, to
'feel that we are greater than we know,' I submit that we respond to it
less by anything that usually passes for knowledge, than by an
improvement of sensibility, a tuning up of the mind to the poet's pitch;
so that the man we are proud to send forth from our Schools will be
remarkable less for something he can take out of his wallet and exhibit
for knowledge, than for _being_ something, and that 'something,' a man of
unmistakable intellectual breeding, whose trained judgment we can trust
to choose the better and reject the worse.

But since this refining of the critical judgment happens to be less easy
of practice than the memorising of much that passes for knowledge--of
what happened to Harriet or what Blake said to the soldier--and far less
easy to examine on, the pedagogic mind (which I implore you not to
suppose me confusing with the scholarly) for avoidance of trouble tends
all the while to dodge or obfuscate what is essential, piling up
accidents and irrelevancies before it until its very face is hidden. And
we should be the more watchful not to confuse the pedagogic mind with the
scholarly since it is from the scholar that the pedagogue pretends to
derive his sanction; ransacking the great genuine commentators--be it a
Skeat or a Masson or (may I add for old reverence' sake?) an Aldis
Wright--fetching home bits of erudition, _non sua poma_, and announcing
'This _must_ be the true Sion, for we found it in a wood.'

Hence a swarm of little school books pullulates annually, all upside down
and wrong from beginn