Ophelia and Don Quixote, were for us creatures whom we knew.  It was the same with later writers.  Byron’s poetry once more appealed to me by its revolutionary note, Shelley was interpreted afresh to me by these mountains which he would have loved.  One incident I recollect which may serve to illustrate this new hold which imaginative literature took upon me.  I opened one evening Great Expectations, and began to read it aloud.  The next morning, at five o’clock, my two boys were contending for the book.  For a month Pip sat beside our hearth, and Joe Gargery winked at us, and ‘that ass’ Pumblechook mouthed his solemn platitudes.  We were continually reminding each other never to forget ‘them as brought us up by hand.’  Could any book have laid hold of us after this fashion if it had been read in the hurried leisure of a city life?  It was the very absence of incident in our quiet lives that made these imaginary incidents delightful.  We lingered over the books we read, extracting from them all their charm, all their wisdom, and there was more good talk, more discriminating criticism heard in my cottage in a month than would be heard in a London drawing-room in a year.  And the explanation is simple.  We had no trivialities to talk about; none of those odds and ends of gossip that do duty for conversation in cities; and thus such talk as we had concerned itself with real thoughts, and the thoughts of wise men and great writers.

One of the principal occupations of my first winter was the education of my boys.  After the approved modern fashion I had intrusted this task to others, upon the foolish assumption that what I paid heavily for must needs be of some value.  I discovered my delusion the moment I came to look into the matter for myself.  I found that they knew nothing perfectly:  certain things they had learned by rote, and could recite with some exactitude, but of the reasons and principles that underlie all real knowledge they knew nothing.  I believe this to be characteristic of almost all modern education, especially since competitive examinations have set the pace.  The brain is gorged with crude masses of undigested fact, which it has no power to assimilate.  Fragments of knowledge are lodged in the mind, but the mind is not taught to co-ordinate its knowledge, or, in other words, to think and reason.  The yearly examination papers of public schools and universities afford ample and often amusing illustrations of this condition of things.  I remember an Oxford tutor, who set papers for a certain Theological College, telling me that one year he put this question:  ’Give some account of the life of Mary, the mother of our Lord.’  This was a question which obviously required some power of synthesis, some exercise of thought and skill in narrative.  One bright youth, after a feeble sentence or two in which the name of Mary was at least included, went on to say, ’At this point it may not be out of place to give a list of the kings of