beautiful vowel-play, on which teacher and
pupil can dwell and learn together. And heaven forbid that as a
teacher I should _insist_ even on half of those I have indicated.
A teacher, as I hold, should watch for what his pupil divines of
his own accord; but if, trafficking with works of inspiration, he
have no gift to catch that inspiration nor power to pass it on,
then I say 'Heaven help him! but he has no valid right on earth
to be in the business.'

And if a teacher have all these chances of teaching--mind you, of
_accurate_ teaching--supplied him by a single Ode of Keats, do
you suppose we cannot set in an Examination paper one intelligent
question upon it, in its own lawful category?

Gentlemen, with the most scrupulous tenderness for aged and even
decrepit interests, we have been trying to liberate you from
certain old bad superstitions and silently laying the stones of a
new School of English, which we believe to be worthy even of
Cambridge.

Our proposals are before the University. Should they be passed,
still everything will depend on the loyalty of its teachers to
the idea; and on that enthusiasm which I suppose to be the nurse
of all studies and know to be the authentic cherishing nurse of
ours. We may even have conceded too much to the letter, but we
have built and built our trust on the spirit 'which maketh
alive.'

[Footnote 1: Why had he to swear this under pain of
excommunication, when the lecturer could so easily keep a
roll-call? But the amount of oathtaking in a medieval University was
prodigious. Even College servants were put on oath for their
duties: Gyps invited their own damnation, bed-makers kissed the
book. Abroad, where examinations were held, the Examiner swore
not to take a bribe, the Candidate neither to give one, nor, if
unsuccessful, to take his vengeance on the Examiner with a knife
or other sharp instrument. At New College, Oxford, the
matriculating undergraduate was required to swear in particular
not to dance in the College Chapel.]

LECTURE VI

ON A SCHOOL OF ENGLISH

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1917

I

It is now, Gentlemen, five years less a term since, feeling (as
they say of other offenders) my position acutely, I had the
honour of reading an Inaugural before this University and the
impudence to loose, in the course of it, a light shaft against a
phrase in the very Ordinance defining the duties of this Chair.

'It shall be the duty of the Professor,' says th