gentleman named
Samuel Johnson, we need not lift up horror-stricken hands to Heaven,
but call to mind how many other things there are in this world to
know. That a girl student should mistake "_Launcelot Gobbo_" for King
Arthur's knight is not a matter of surprise to one who remembers how
three young men, graduates of the oldest and proudest colleges in
the land, placidly confessed ignorance of "_Petruchio_."
Shakespeare, after all, belongs to "the realms of gold." The higher
education, as now understood, permits the student to escape him, and
to escape the Bible as well. As a consequence of these exemptions,
a bachelor of arts may be, and often is, unable to meet his
intellectual equals with mental ease. Allusions that have passed
into the common vocabulary of cultivated men and women have no
meaning for him. Does not Mr. Andrew Lang tell us of an Oxford student
who wanted to know what people meant when they said "hankering after
the flesh-pots of Egypt"; and has not the present writer been asked
by a Harvard graduate if she could remember a Joseph, "somewhere"
in the Old Testament, who was "decoyed into Egypt by a coat of many
colours"?

To measure _any_ form of schooling by its direct results is to narrow
a wide issue to insignificance. The by-products of education are the
things which count. It has been said by an admirable educator that
the direct results obtained from Eton and Rugby are a few copies of
indifferent Latin verse; the by-products are the young men who run
the Indian Empire. We may be startled for a moment by discovering
a student of political economy to be wholly and happily ignorant of
Mr. Lloyd-George's "Budget," the most vivid object-lesson of our
day; but how many Americans who talked about the budget, and had
impassioned views on the subject, knew what it really contained? If
the student's intelligence is so trained that she has some adequate
grasp of economics, if she has been lifted once and forever out of
the Robin Hood school of political economy, which is so dear to a
woman's generous heart, it matters little how early or how late she
becomes acquainted with the history of her own time. "Depend upon
it," said the wise Dr. Johnson, whom undergraduates are sometimes
wont to slight, "no woman was ever the worse for sense and knowledge."
It was his habit to rest a superstructure on foundations.

The college graduate is far more immature than her characteristic
self-reliance leads us to suppos