The shell we slaves of time drag with us ever, Through which our souls, as if immured in glass, Become distorted, and we peer and strain, But find each other's real features never; THIRD HEAD THE CASTLE IN THE AIR A Golden Talisman. 1. The Babu Speech. 2. Bad Language. 3. « Dynamite. » 4. The Science of Shells.-5. Idol and Ideal.-6. An Algebraical Expression. -- What is the meaning of the word Idealist, or Idealistic, as used by Nobel in this Testament? The question is not-what is Idealism? It iswhat kind of books did the Testator wish to receive this Prize? It will be seen at once that the second of these questions is very much easier to answer than the first. No one has ever succeeded in defining poetry to any one else's satisfaction-a chemist might define it as the crystal of prose-but universities and academies award prizes every year for poems, and no difficulty is felt as to what works are eligible for the prize. Again, an able writer named Austin once set himself to determine the province of jurisprudence. He died leaving his work unfinished; and the extensive fragment that remains is an endless chain of definitions, not one of them complete. He attempts to define a law, a right, and so on, and the more he toils, the more endless his task becomes. Yet the Courts never sit for a day without using the words law and right in some practical application; and Austin was himself professor of jurisprudence. The difference between a legal argument and a logical one is that the former is concerned with some practical issue, such as the disposal of a sum of money, and is determined by the judgment of a Court. That is the difference which Nobel has made by this bequest. This bag of gold of his is, as it were, a talisman, trusting in which we may adventure in the enchanted wood of words; by means of which we may conjure the demons that infest it, and compel the sorcerer's victims to resume their natural shape. As well as a talisman, we are provided with a compass, by the words which are the governing clause of the whole Testament-" the benefit of mankind. Should we be tempted to stray into devious paths, should we find ourselves wandering round and round without advancing from our starting-point, we have only to glance at this compass, and it will point us forward in the right direction, towards the enchanted castle of the ogre. So armed, so guided, the White Knight Errant ought to reach his bourn. I Ideal, Idealism, Idealist-these words are current in most of the languages of Europe, but they are not natives of any. They appear in the same form in Swedish and in English, but they are not of Swedish nor of English growth. They wear a look of ancient Greece, but yet they are not genuine Greek words. Plato never heard of them; the Greek lexicon knows them not. They belong to a large and increasing class of words which I can best characterise by naming them Babu. The English in India, whether to make the task of government easier, or in the belief that our civilisation must be better for the Hindus than their own, have set up schools to train the natives in our ways, and, to begin with, in our speech. There is a large class of natives called Babus who learn very readily up to a certain point, that is to say, they write our words correctly, and they have some notion of what the words mean; but English has not replaced their native speech, and hence it fits them like a borrowed garment, and they are betrayed into awkward and laughable mistakes in using it, which have given rise to the term Babu English. Now that is just the process from which a great part of Europe, and especially England itself, has been suffering for many hundreds of years. Our speech bewrays us to be the freedmen of Rome. Our schools are Roman schools set up by missionaries from the Mediterranean in whose minds it was the very aim and end of education to tame the young barbarian of the North into an obedient provincial of the great Roman Raj. Saint Ninian, it is candidly recorded, went to convert the Picts to Christianity in the hope of putting an end to their attacks upon their Christian neighbours. The work of the monks has remained practically untouched ever since. Our schools are still called grammar schools, which means Latin-grammar schools, and Latin is the chief thing taught in them. Latin is the official language of our universities, and by an educated man we mean a man who has been taught Latin. The whole theory of our education still is that the young Englishman should makebelieve to be an ancient Roman. The king who still writes himself on his coins Britannorum Rex is doing homage for his crown to Caesar and to Gregory. After the Normans came in aid of the monks England seemed to hang in doubt between the Gothic and Romance dialects. The result of this is seen in our vocabulary. We have, in a more marked degree than any other European people, two sets of words, folk words and book words. The first we learn at home, and use most in talking; the second we learn at school, and use most in writing. The folk words. come to us as the wrappings of our earliest thoughts and feelings, and form, as it were, the mind's natural skin. The book words follow after the brain has begun to harden, and are more like clothing which |