Joyous Gard

manated. I imagine that it dates from a time when knowledge meant an imagined acquaintance with magical secrets, short cuts to wealth, health, influence, fame. Even now the app

, a belief that learning still lingers at Oxford and Cambridge; those marvellous Dons, who appear in the pages of novels, men who read folios all the morning and drink port all the evening, where are they in reality? Not at Cambridge, certainly. I would travel many miles, I would travel to Oxford, if I thought I could find such an adorable figure. But the Don is now a brisk and efficient man of business, a paterfamilias with provision to make for his family. He has no time for folios and no incl

ica. If we do not take care, the high culture will desert our shores, like

other and sister, he thought. They looked out for a time in silence, leaning on the parapet; and then the brother said softly, "How much we should enjoy all this, if we were not so ignorant!" Like all Americans, they wanted to know! It was not enough for them to see the high houses, the fantastic towers, the great blind blocks of medi?val palaces, thrust so grimly out above the house-tops. It all meant life and history, strife and sorrow, it all needed interpreting and transfiguring and re-peopling; without that it was dumb and silent, vague and bewildering. One does not know whether to admire or to sigh! Ought one not to be able to take beauty as it comes? What if one does not w

that it was signed." The fact that it was so signed affects our liberties, the knowledge only affects us, if it inspires us to fresh desire of liberty, wh

the man with

to himself

own, my n

ngland; but I should think that if Scott's is a fair test of deadness of soul, there must be a good many people in England who are as dead as door-nails! The

m, so little connected with anything that concerns them in the remotest degree. We ought, I think, to wind our way slowly back into the past from the present; we ought to start with modern problems and modern ideas, and show people how they came into being; we ought to learn about the world, as it is,

. So the whole process of education becomes a dreary wrestling with the uninteresting and the unattainable; and when we have broken the neck of infantile c

ently out of a full mind, penetrated with zest and enjoyment. One followed the little rill of literary craftsmanship so easily out of the plain to its high source among the hills, till I wondered why on earth I ha

ted, could be a beautiful and attractive thing, not a mere fuss

ar ignorant. And then the time comes for Latin Grammar, and Cicero de Senectute, and C?sar's Commentaries, and the bewildered stripling privately resolves to have no more than

sense and imaginative sympathy. How can a little boy guess that some of the most beautiful stories in the world lie hid among

ion-as indeed it is, I look round my book-lined shelves, and reflect how much of interest and pleasure those parallel rows have meant to me, and how I struggled into the u

g, with detention and imposition, can ever wholly regain its charm. I am afraid that we must make a clean sweep of the old processes, if we have any intention of interesting our youth in the beauty of human ideas and their expression. But while we do not care about beauty and interest in life, while we conscientiously believ

are; only do not let us indulge in the cant in which educators so freely indulge, the claim that we are interested in ideas intellectual or artistic, and that we are trying to educate our youth in these things. We do produce some intellectual athletes, and we knock a few hardy