ABSTRACT
It is the design of the works noted below,1 as explained in the preface to the first of them, ‘to encourage and assist the study of English literature as an essential and systematic part of a liberal education.’ The words are happily chosen; for fortunately, that study does not now require to be originated; it needs only encouragement and assistance. That study is now prosecuted, not only in our colleges, but also in our schools, in a way, and to an extent which were unknown not many years ago. We have passed from the stage in which ‘elegant extracts’ were used merely as a means of teaching to read or to declaim; and we now recognise the importance of our national literature as ‘an effective instrument of mental training and refinement.’ The improved methods of studying the language have conduced greatly to this result. The teacher of English does not now merely teach his pupils ‘to read and write the English language with propriety,’ – an end often professed but seldom accomplished, – but he uses the language and literature in combination as a valuable instrument of mental culture, and his professional status has risen proportionately with the elevation of his aims. The value and richness of our literature as such have always been admitted in theory; it has been reserved for the present generation to demonstrate the value of its study as a discipline. The real benefit of a classical education lies, for the great mass of men, not so much in the positive knowledge acquired, as in the method pursued in acquiring what may afterwards be forgotten. There are hundreds of men who, after spending years in the study of Latin and Greek, are unable to translate a line of Horace or of Homer. Were these years, then, so much time wasted? Has their labour been lost? Certainly not; many benefits of the training survive, just as strength of muscle and grace of motion survive the gymnastic or calisthenic exercises which have been long ago disused. The knowledge of words, and facts, and systems may have vanished; but the strength and acuteness of judgment, the accuracy of thought, the refinement of taste remain, and are being daily and hourly exercised upon objects as far as possible removed from the mental gymnasium in which they were first developed.
