home and home influences to become, from their early boyhood, the citizens of a new society. I mention these patent facts in passing only to show that an arrangement which would be favourable to study among schoolmasters would be also, in respects far more important, a national benefit. That the day-school system would be comparatively favourable to study, as it has proved to be in Germany, need hardly be pointed out. It would relieve the masters of the load of anxious and responsible work which is inseparable from the care of a house.

School work can of course be only preparatory, but a more thorough initiation into the interpretation of ancient life and the methods of classical study may be expected at the universities. I suppose that the Cambridge system, if worked with reasonable flexibility, would allow of all the freedom that is desirable. But at Oxford the claims of the examinations, for which a definite set of books is prescribed, are so exacting as practically to leave no room for lectures in the higher scholarship. I am not complaining of the main principle on which the Oxford final examination is based; there is no hardship, there are even great ad- ' vantages, in compelling a classical student to read Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Thucydides. A prescription of this kind acts as a check upon vagaries, and secures to the student a thorough knowledge of important books. But the demands of the examination should not be, as they are at present, so rigid as to leave no

time for the formation of voluntary classes in which instruction might be given in the rudiments of criticism. Such classes would in all probability never be large, nor would they attract the ablest among the students. But they would provide, it may fairly be said, for the wants of a reasonable number of men with a taste for criticism and a capacity for contributing something original towards it, who now are left almost entirely without guidance. In these voluntary classes tutors might give a general introduction to the principles of philological evidence, whether derived from manuscripts or inscriptions, using manuscripts, where such are available, for illustration (even inferior manuscripts would be very serviceable in this way where good ones are not accessible); or the student might be taken carefully through some great work of criticism such as Bentley's 'Horace' or 'Manilius,' or Madvig's 'De Finibus,' the tutor calling special attention to the method of the critic, its strong and its weak points; or some important period in the history of scholarship (a subject almost entirely ignored by Oxford men) might be studied.

No such distinction should be drawn between the form and the matter of classical writings as is now drawn at Oxford, where the students are taken first through a preliminary course of poetry and oratory, and are afterwards introduced to the historians and philosophers, reading, for instance, for the first public examination Demosthenes and Cicero and Homer and

Virgil, and for the second Thucydides and Livy and Aristotle and Plato. This arrangement not only makes the first year of the student's Oxford life a mere continuation of his school work, but prevents him from taking any view of classical literature as a whole.

The comparative study of languages should be begun at the universities not (as now at Oxford) by the reading of compendia or notes from lectures, but by learning the rudiments of Sanskrit.

Students of philology, after they have completed their university course, should be invited by the professors to co-operate with them in original work, or to undertake original work of their own. Or they should at least be directed how to set about such work, if it be their wish to undertake it.

Suggestions of this kind (and there are doubtless many others which will occur to minds more fertile than my own) might be acted upon without materially modifying the principles on which the course of studies. at our universities is based. They require for their application no more than an increased elasticity in the examination system, with which, in its main features, I should not propose to interfere. I suppose that the demands of the examinations are nowhere more rigorous than at Oxford; but even there, if the mass of compulsory work were diminished, and a real freedom given to learn and to teach subjects falling outside the prescribed course, there would be little difficulty in communicating, to those interested in the matter, the

elements of philological method, and removing from the Oxford system what no one interested in classical antiquity can but regard as a glaring defect. I am pleading for a kind of instruction with which I suppose all serious teachers and students of the natural sciences to be familiar, and which is indeed inseparable from the progressive pursuit of any branch of knowledge what

ever.

Classical study can maintain itself as a living element of knowledge, but not as a patchwork of accomplishments. The revival of learning in England requires the aid not of genius, but of ordinary ability and good will. Singleness of aim among even a few like-minded persons can accomplish much, and it is to be hoped that the importance of research to education, its efficacy in strengthening the individual character of the student, and the general indirect influence of learning in preventing the degeneration of literature, will soon be recognised not by a few but by many. In resources of all kinds, endowments, leisure, opportunities, our universities are exceptionally rich. Much has been done to remove the old restrictions which prevented free access to these resources; the duty remains of employing them fruitfully, and adding a new element of wellbeing to the national life of England.

APPENDICES.

I.

Extract from Prof. Max Müller's 'Chips from a German
Workshop,' vol. iv. pp. 4–10.

OXFORD and Cambridge, as independent corporations, withdrawn alike from the support and from the control of the State, have always looked upon the instruction of the youth of England as their proper work; and nowhere has the tradition of classical learning been handed down more faithfully from one generation to another than in England; nowhere has its generous spirit more thoroughly pervaded the minds of statesmen, poets, artists, and moulded the character of that large and important class of independent and cultivated men, without which this country would cease to be what it has been for the last two centuries, a respublica, a commonwealth, in the best sense of the word. Oxford and Cambridge have supplied what England expected or demanded, and as English parents did not send their sons to learn Chinese or to study Cornish, there was naturally no supply where there was no demand. The professorial element in the university, the true representative of higher learning and independent research, withered away; the tutorial assumed the vastest proportions during this and the last centuries. But looking back to the earlier history of the English universities, I believe it is a mistake to suppose that Oxford, one of the most celebrated universities during the Middle Ages and in the modern history of Europe, could ever have ignored the duty, so fully recognised by other European universities, of not only handing