re, edited
by Clark and Aldis Wright; a few of Bacon's Essays, Milton's
early poems, Stopford Brooke's little primer, a book of extracts
for committal to memory, with perhaps Chaucer's "Prologue" and a
Speech of Burke. In the great Public Schools _no_ English
Literature was studied, save in those which had invented 'Modern
Sides,' to prepare boys specially for Woolwich or Sandhurst or
the Indian Civil Service; for entrance to which examinations were
held on certain prescribed English Classics, and marks mainly
given for acquaintance with the editors' notes.

In the Universities, the study of English Classics was not
officially recognised at all.

Let us not hastily suppose that this neglect of English rested
wholly on unreason, or had nothing to say for itself. Teachers
and tutors of the old Classical Education (as it was called)
could plead as follows:

'In the first place,' they would say, 'English Literature is
too _easy_ a study. Our youth, at School or University, starts
on his native classics with a liability which in any foreign
language he has painfully to acquire. The voices that
murmured around his cradle, the voice of his nurse, of his
governess, of the parson on Sundays; the voices of village
boys, stablemen, gamekeepers and farmers--friendly or
unfriendly--of callers, acquaintances, of the children he met
at Children's Parties; the voices that at the dinner-table
poured politics or local gossip into the little pitcher with
long ears--all these were English voices speaking in English:
and all these were all the while insensibly leading him up the
slope from the summit of which he can survey the promised
land spread at his feet as a wide park; and he holds the key of
the gates, to enter and take possession. Whereas,' the old
instructors would continue, 'with the classics of any foreign
language we take him at the foot of the steep ascent, spread a
table before him (_mensa, mensa, mensam_ ...) and coax or drive
him up with variations upon amo, "I love" or [Greek: tupto],
"I beat," until he, too, reaches the summit and beholds the
landscape:

But O, what labour!
O Prince, what pain!'

Now so much of truth, Gentlemen, as this plea contains was
admitted last term by your Senate, in separating the English
Tripos, in which a certain linguistic familiarity may be not
rashly presumed of the student, from the Foreign Language
Triposes, divided into two par