ture was _not_ written for
schoolmasters, nor for schoolmistresses. I would not exchange it
for a wilderness of schoolmasters. It should be delivered from
them, who, with their silly _Ablauts_ and 'tendencies,' can
themselves neither read nor write. For the proof? Having the
world's quintessential store of mirth and sharp sorrow, wit,
humour, comfort, farce, comedy, tragedy, satire; the glories of
our birth and state, piled all at their elbows, only one man of
the crowd--and he M. Jusserand, a Frenchman--has contrived to
draw out of the mass one interesting well-written history of the
'subject.'

IX

Is there, then, no better way? Yes there is a better way: for the
French have it, with their language and literature. In France, as
Matthew Arnold noted, a generation ago, the ordinary journey-man
work of literature is done far better and more conscientiously
than with us. In France a man feels it almost a personal stain,
an unpatriotic _lache,_ to write even on a police-order anything
so derogatory to the tradition of his language as our Cabinet
Ministers read out as answers to our House of Commons. I am told
that many a Maire in a small provincial town in N.E. France, even
when overwhelmed--_accable_--with the sufferings of his
town-folk, has truly felt the iron enter into his soul on being
forced to sign a document written out for him in the invaders'
French.

Cannot we treat our noble inheritance of literature and language
as scrupulously, and with as high a sense of their appertaining
to our national honour, as a Frenchman cherishes _his_ language,
_his_ literature? Cannot we study to leave our inheritance---as
the old Athenian put it temperately, 'not worse but a little
better than we found it'?

I think we can, and should. I shall close to-day, Gentlemen, with
the most modest of perorations. In my first lecture before you,
in January 1913, I quoted to you the artist in "Don Quixote" who,
being asked what animal he was painting, answered diffidently
'That is as it may turn out.'

The teaching of our language and literature is, after all, a new
thing and still experimental. The main tenets of those who, aware
of this, have worked on the scheme for a School of English in
Cambridge, the scheme recently passed by your Senate and
henceforth to be in operation, are three:--

_The first._ That literature cannot be divorced from life: that
(for example) you cannot understand Chaucer aright, unless you
have the bac