e nymphs':

You nymphs, called Naiads, of the windring brooks,
With your sedged crowns...

--and if the child demand what is meant by 'pioned and twilled
brims,' you have to answer him that nobody knows.

These difficulties--perhaps for you, certainly for the young
reader or listener--are reserved delights. My old schoolmaster
even indulges this suspicion--'I never can persuade myself that
Shakespeare would have passed high in a Civil Service Examination
on one of his own plays.' At any rate you don't _begin_ with
these difficulties: you don't (or I hope you don't) read the
notes first: since, as Bacon puts it, 'Studies teach not their
own use.'

As for the child, he is not '_grubbing_ for beauties'; he
magnificently ignores what he cannot for the moment understand,
being intent on _What Is,_ the heart and secret of the adventure.
He _is_ Ferdinand (I repeat) and the isle is 'full of voices.' If
these voices were all intelligible, why then, as Browning would
say, 'the less Island it.'

V

I have purposely exhibited "The Tempest" at its least tractable.
Who will deny that _as a whole_ it can be made intelligible even
to very young children by the simple process of reading it with
them intelligently? or that the mysteries such a reading leaves
unexplained are of the sort to fascinate a child's mind and
allure it? But if this be granted, I have established my
contention that the Humanities should not be treated as a mere
crown and ornament of education; that they should inform every
part of it, from the beginning, in every school of the realm:
that whether a child have more education or less education, what
he has can be, and should be, a 'liberal education' throughout.

Matthew Arnold, as every one knows, used to preach the use of
these masterpieces as prophylactics of taste. I would I could
make you feel that they are even more necessary to us.

The reason why?--The reason is that every child born in these
Islands is born into a democracy which, apart from home affairs,
stands committed to a high responsibility for the future welfare
and good governance of Europe. For three centuries or so it has
held rule over vast stretches of the earth's surface and many
millions of strange peoples: while its obligations towards the
general civilisation of Europe, if not intermittent, have been
tightened or relaxed, now here, now there, by policy, by
commerce, by dynastic alliances, by sudden revulsions or
sympathies