r first lecture, that the
argument had drawn us, as by a double chain, up to the edge of a bold
leap, over which I deferred asking you to take the plunge with me. Yet
the plunge must be taken, and to-day I see nothing for it but to harden
our hearts.

Well, then, I propose to you that, English Literature being (as we
agreed) an Art, with a living and therefore improvable language for its
medium or vehicle, a part--and no small part--of our business is _to
practise it._ Yes, I seriously propose to you that here in Cambridge we
_practise writing_: that we practise it not only for our own improvement,
but to make, or at least try to make, appropriate, perspicuous, accurate,
persuasive writing a recognisable hall-mark of anything turned out by our
English School. By all means let us study the great writers of the past
for their own sakes; but let us study them for our guidance; that we, in
our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of
time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of
Shakespeare or of Burke. Portraits of other great ones look down on you
in your college halls: but while you are young and sit at the brief
feast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts and
movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?

I protest, Gentlemen, that if our eyes had not been sealed, as with wax,
by the pedagogues of whom I spoke a fortnight ago, this one habit of
regarding our own literature as a _hortus siccus_, this our neglect to
practise good writing as the constant auxiliary of an Englishman's
liberal education, would be amazing to you seated here to-day as it will
be starkly incredible to the future historian of our times. Tell me,
pray; if it concerned _Painting_--an art in which Englishmen boast a
record far briefer, far less distinguished--what would you think of a
similar acquiescence in the past, a like haste to presume the dissolution
of aptitude and to close accounts, a like precipitancy to divorce us from
the past, to rob the future of hope and even the present of lively
interest? Consider, for reproof of these null men, the Discourses
addressed (in a pedantic age, too) by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the Members
and Students of the Royal Academy. He has (as you might expect) enough to
say of Tintoretto, of Titian, of Caracci, and of the duty of studying
their work with patience, with humility. But why does he exhort his
hearers to con them?--Wh