m, and so
pernicious; or merely foolish, as certain artistic conventions
are traceable, when a Ruskin comes to judgment, back to nothing
better than folly: and it becomes men of honest mind, in dealing
with anything recognisable as a convention, to examine its
accepted fallacy, whether it be well understood or ill understood;
beneficent or pernicious or merely foolish or both foolish and
pernicious: and this is often most handily done by tracing its
history.

Now I shall assume that the framers of the Ordinance regulating
the duties of this Chair knew well enough, of their own reading,
that English Literature deals with a vast variety of subjects:
and that, if any piece of writing miss to deal with its
particular subject, so closely that theme and treatment can
scarcely be separated, by so much will it be faulty as literature.
Milton is fairly possessed with the story of Man's fall, Boswell
possessed with Johnson, Shelley with hatred of tyranny in all its
manifestations, Mill again with the idea of Liberty: and it is
only because we had knowledge presented to us at an age when we
thought more attentively of apples, that we still fail to
recognise in Euclid and Dr Todhunter two writers who are excellent
because possessed with a passion for Geometry.

I infer, then, that the framers of the Ordinance, when they
employed this phrase 'the study of the subject of English
Literature,' knew well enough that no such thing existed in
nature, but adopted the convention that English Literature could
be separated somehow from its content and treated as a subject
all by itself, for teaching purposes: and, for purposes of
examination, could be yoked up with another subject called
English Language, as other Universities had yoked it.

V

I believe the following to be a fair account of how these
examinations in English Language and Literature came to pass, and
how a certain kind of student came to pass these Examinations. At
any rate since the small revolution has happened in my life-time
and most of it since I was able to observe, the account here is
drawn from my own observation and may be checked and corrected by
yours.

Thirty-five or forty years ago--say in the late seventies or
early eighties--some preparatory schools, and others that taught
older boys but ranked below the great Public Schools in repute,
taught so much of English Literature as might be comprised, at a
rough calculation, in two or three plays of Shakespea