his time of day that the world can contain anyone
ignorant of the published Transactions of the Wiltshire Walking
Club, Vol. III, p. 159--"Puddlehampton, its Rise and Decline, with
a note on Vespasian?"'

(e) These pioneers--pushing the importance of English, but
occupied more and more with origins and with bad authors, simply
could not see the vital truth; that English Literature is a
continuing thing, ten times more alive to-day than it was in the
times they studied and belauded. The last word upon them is that
not a man of them could write prose in the language they thrust
on our study. To them, far more than to the old classical
scholars, English was a shut book: a large book, but closed and
clasped, material to heighten a desk for schoolmasters and
schoolmistresses.

But schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, like chickens and curses,
come home to roost. Once set up your plea for a Tripos of English
Language and Literature on the lower plea that it will provide
for what _they_ call a 'felt want,' and sooner or later you give
English Language and Literature into _their_ hands, and then you
get the fallacy full-flowered into a convention. English
Literature henceforth is a 'subject,' divorced from life: and
what they have made of it, let a thousand handbooks and so-called
histories attest. But this world is not a wilderness of
class-rooms. English Language? They cannot write it, at all events.
They do not (so far as I can discover) try to write it. They talk
and write about it; how the poor deceased thing outgrew infantile
ailments, how it was operated on for _umlaut,_ how it parted with
its vermiform appendix and its inflexions one by one, and lost
its vowel endings in muted e's.

And they went and told the sexton,
And the sexton toll'd the bell.

But when it comes to _writing_; to keeping bright the noble
weapon of English, testing its poise and edge, feeling the grip,
handing it to their pupils with the word, 'Here is the sword of
your fathers, that has cloven dragons. So use it, that we who
have kept it bright may be proud of you, and of our pains, and of
its continuing valiance':--why, as I say, they do not even _try._
Our unprofessional forefathers, when they put pen to paper, did
attempt English prose, and not seldom achieved it. But take up
any elaborate History of English Literature and read, and, as you
read, ask yourselves, 'How can one of the rarest delights of life
be converted into _this_