e me to be right in this. Rather, if you will, presume me to
be wrong until the evidence is laid out for your judgment. But at least
understand to-day how profoundly a man, holding that view, must deplore
the whole course of academical literary study during these thirty years
or so, and how distrust what he holds to be its basal fallacies.

For, literature being written in language, yet being something quite
distinct, and the development of our language having been fairly
continuous, while the literature of our nation exhibits a false start--a
break, silence, repentance, then a renewal on right glorious lines--our
students of literature have been drilled to follow the specious
continuance while ignoring the actual break, and so to commit the one
most fatal error in any study; that of mistaking the inessential for the
essential.

As I tried to persuade you in my Inaugural Lecture, our first duty to
Literature is to study it absolutely, to understand, in Aristotelian
phrase, its [Greek: to ti en einae]; what it _is_ and what it _means_. If
that be our quest, and the height of it be realised, it is nothing to
us--or almost nothing--to know of a certain alleged poet of the fifteenth
century, that he helped us over a local or temporary disturbance in our
vowel-endings. It is everything to have acquired and to possess such a
norm of Poetry within us that we know whether or not what he wrote was
POETRY.

Do not think this easy. The study of right literary criticism is much
more difficult than the false path usually trodden; so difficult, indeed,
that you may easily count the men who have attempted to grasp the great
rules and apply them to writing as an art to be practised. But the names
include some very great ones--Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian, Corneille,
Boileau, Dryden, Johnson, Lessing, Coleridge, Goethe, Sainte-Beuve,
Arnold: and the study, though it may not find its pattern in our time, is
not unworthy to be proposed for another attempt before a great
University.

LECTURE IX.

ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (II)

Wednesday, November 5

Some of you whose avocations call them, from time to time, to Newmarket
may have noted, at a little distance out from Cambridge, a by-road
advertised as leading to Quy and Swaffham. It also leads to the site of
an old Roman villa; but you need not interrupt your business to visit
this, since the best thing discovered there--a piece of tessellated
pavement--has been