aintance, with Shakespeare. Very well; but next
we have to write a paper and answer questions on the outlines of
English Literature from 1350 to 1832--almost 500 years--, and
next to write a paper and show particular knowledge of English
Literature between 1700 and 1785--eighty-five years. Next comes a
paper on passages from selected English verse and prose writings
--the Statute discreetly avoids calling them literature--between
1200 and 1500, exclusive of Chaucer; with questions on language,
metre, literary history and literary criticism: then a paper on
Chaucer with questions on language, metre, literary history and
literary criticism: lastly a paper on writing in the Wessex
dialect of Old English, with questions on the cornet, flute,
harp, sackbut, language, metre and literary history.

Now if you were to qualify yourself for all this as a scholar
should, and in two years, you would certainly deserve to be
addressed by Mr Hamerton as 'A Young Man of Letters who worked
Excessively'; and to work excessively is not good for anyone.
Yet, on the other hand, you are precluded from using, for your
'cerebral inconveniences,' the heroic remedy exhibited by Mr
Hamerton's enterprising tradesman, since on that method you would
not attain to the main object of your laudable ambition, a
Cambridge degree.

But the matter is very much worse than your Statute makes it out.
Take one of the papers in which some actual acquaintance with
Literature is required the Special Period from 1700 to 1785; then
turn to your "Cambridge History of English Literature", and you
will find that the mere bibliography of those eighty-five years
occupies something like five or six hundred pages--five or six
hundred pages of titles and authors in simple enumeration! The
brain reels; it already suffers 'cerebral inconveniences.' But
stretch the list back to Chaucer, back through Chaucer to those
alleged prose writings in the Wessex dialect, then forward from
1785 to Wordsworth, to Byron, to Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson,
Browning, Meredith, even to this year in which literature still
lives and engenders; and the brain, if not too giddy indeed,
stands as Satan stood on the brink of Chaos--

Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross--

and sees itself, with him, now plumbing a vast vacuity, and anon
nigh-foundered, 'treading the crude consistence.'

The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to
_know_ it in