Renascence loved beauty of expression.

second, by the beauty of the language in which it conveys them. In the greatest works the two excellences will be combined.*

Now the literary taste proper fastens especially on the second of the two, i.e., on beauty of expression; and the Renascence was the revival of literary taste. "It was," as

Mark Pattison says, "the conception of style or finished expression which had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric, and which re-entered the circle of ideas after a thousand years of oblivion and abeyance." If we lose sight of this, we shall be perplexed by the unbounded enthusiasm which we find in the sixteenth century for the old classics. What great evangel, we may ask, had Cicero and Virgil and Ovid, or even Plato and the Greek dramatists, for men who lived when Europe had experienced a thousand years of Christianity? The answer is simple. They had none whatever. Their thoughts and conceptions were not adapted to the wants of the new world. The civilization of the Christian nations of the sixteenth century was a very different thing from the civilization of Greece and Rome. It had its own thoughts, its own problems, its own wants. The old-world thoughts could not be thought over again by it. though not admitted by the Renascence scholars themselves. Had it been the thoughts of the ancients which seemed to them so valuable they would have made some effort to diffuse those thoughts in the languages of the modern world. Much as a great literary work loses by translation, there may still be enough left of it to be a

This indeed was felt

On the nature of literature see Cardinal Newman's "Lectures on the Nature of a University. University Subjects. II. Litera ure."

No translations. The "educated.

source of instruction and delight. The thoughts of Aristotle, conveyed in a Latin translation of an Arabic translation, profoundly affected the mind of Europe in the Middle Ages. The Bible, or Book par excellence, is known to few indeed in its original form. Some great writers-Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and the author of the "Arabian Nights"-please and instruct nations who know not the sound of the languages wherein their works are composed. If then the great writers of Greece and Rome had been valued for their matter, their works would have been translated by the Renascence scholars as the Bible was translated by the Reforiners, and the history of modern education would have taken a very different turn from that which awaited it. But it was not so. The Renascence scholars did all they could to discourage translations. For the grand discovery which we call the Revival of Learning was, not that the ancients had something to say, but that whatever they had to say they knew how to say it.

§ 9. And thus it happens that in the period of change, when Europe was re-arranging its institutions, developing new ideas and settling into new grooves of habit, we find the men most influential in education entirely fascinated by beauty of expression, and this in two ancient languages, so that the one thing needful for the young seemed to them an introduction to the study of ancient writings. The inevitable consequence was this: education became a mere synonym for instruction in Latin and Greek. The only ideal set up for the "educated" was the classical scholar.

§ 10. Perhaps the absurdity of taking this ideal, an ideal which is obviously fitted for a small class of men only, and proposing it for general adoption, was partly concealed. from the Renascence scholars by the peculiar circumstances

Spread of literature by printing.

of their age. No doubt they thought literature would in the future be a force capable of much wider application than it had ever been before. True, literature had till then affected a small class only. Literature meant books, books meant MSS., and MSS. were rare and costly. Literature, the embodiment of grand thoughts in grand words, had existed before letters, or at least without letters. The Homeric poems, for example, had been known to thousands who could not read or write. But beauty of expression naturally got associated and indeed confounded with the art by which it was preserved; so the creations of the mind, when embodied in particular combinations of words, acquired the name of literature or letters, and became almost exclusively the affair of those who had opportunities of study, opportunities afforded only to the few. During the Middle Ages every one who could read was allowed his "privilege of clergy;" that is, he was assumed to be a clergyman. Literature then was not thought of as a means of instruction. But at the very time that the beauty of the ancient writings dawned on the mind of Europe, a mechanical invention seemed to remove all hindrances to the spread of literature. The scholars seized on the printing press and thought by means of it to give all "the educated" a knowledge of classics.

§ II. We cannot help speculating what would have been the effect of the discovery of printing if it had been made at another time. As there may be literature without books, so there may be books without literature. If at the time of the invention of printing there had been no literature, no creations of individual minds embodied in permanent forms of speech, books might have been used as apparatus in a mental gymnasium, or they might have been made the

School course settled before Bacon.

means of conveying information. But just then the intellect of Europe was tired of mental gymnastics. It had taken exercise in the Trivium like a squirrel in its revolving cage, and was vexed to find it made no progress.*. As for information there was little to be had. The age of observation So the printing press

and of physical science was not yet.

was entirely at the service of the new passion for literature and the scholars dreamed of the general diffusion of literary culture by means of printed books.

§ 12. For some two centuries the literary spirit had supreme control over the intellect of Europe, and the literary spirit could then find satisfaction nowhere but in the study of the ancient classics. The natural consequence was that throughout this period the "educated man” was supposed to be identified with the classical scholar. The great rival of the literary spirit, the scientific spirit which cares for nothing but sequences independent of the human mind, began to show itself early in the seventeenth century: its first great champion was Francis Bacon. But by this time the school course of study had heen settled, and two centuries had to elapse before the scientific spirit could unsettle it again. Even now when we speak of a man as "well-educated we are commonly understood to mean that in his youth he was taught the two classical languages. § 13. The taking of the classical scholar as the only

* I see Carlyle has used a similar metaphor in the same connexion: "Consider the old schoolmen and their pilgrimage towards Truth! the faithfullest endeavour, incessant unwearied motion; often great natural vigour, only no progress; nothing but antic feats of one limb poised against the other; there they balanced, somer-eted, and made postures; at best gyrated swiftly with some pleasure like spinning dervishes and ended where they began."-Characteristics, Misc., vol. iii, 5.

First defect: Learner above Doer.

ideal of the educated man has been a fruitful source of evil in the history of education.

I. This ideal exalted the learner above the doer. As far back as Xenophon, we find a contest between the passive ideal and the active, between the excellence which depends on a knowledge of what others have thought and done and the excellence which comes of thinking and doing. But the excellence derived from learning had never been highly esteemed. To be able to repeat Homer's poetry was regarded in Greece as we now regard a pleasing accomplishment; but the dignity of the learned man as such was not within the range of Greek ideas. Many of the Romans after they began to study Greek literature certainly piqued themselves on being good Greek scholars, and Cicero occasionally quotes with all the airs of a pedant; but so thoroughly was the contrary ideal, the ideal of the doer, established at Rome, that nobody ever dreamt of placing its rival above it. In the decline of the Empire, especially at Alexandria, we find for the first time honours paid to the learned man; but he was soon lost sight of again. At the Renascence he burst into sudden blaze, and it was then discovered that he was what every man would wish to be. Thus the Renascence scholars, notwithstanding their ad miration of the great nations of antiquity, set up an ideal which those nations would heartily have despised. The schoolmaster very readily adopted this ideal; and schools have been places of learning, not training, ever since.

§ 14. II. The next defect I observe in the Renascence ideal is this: it attributes to literature more direct power over common life than literature has ever had, or is ever likely to have.

I say direct power, for indirectly literature is one of the