not literature at all that was taught, but science in a very bad form.  It is quite obvious that grammar is science and not literature.  The analysis of a text by the help of the rules of grammar is just as much a scientific operation as the analysis of a chemical compound by the help of the rules of chemical analysis.  There is nothing that appeals to the aesthetic faculty in that operation; and I ask multitudes of men of my own age, who went through this process, whether they ever had a conception of art or literature until they obtained it for themselves after leaving school?  Then you may say, “If that is so, if the education was scientific, why cannot you be satisfied with it?” I say, because although it is a scientific training, it is of the most inadequate and inappropriate kind.  If there is any good at all in scientific education it is that men should be trained, as I said before, to know things for themselves at first hand, and that they should understand every step of the reason of that which they do.

I desire to speak with the utmost respect of that science—­philology—­of which grammar is a part and parcel; yet everybody knows that grammar, as it is usually learned at school, affords no scientific training.  It is taught just as you would teach the rules of chess or draughts.  On the other hand, if I am to understand by a literary education the study of the literatures of either ancient or modern nations—­but especially those of antiquity, and especially that of ancient Greece; if this literature is studied, not merely from the point of view of philological science, and its practical application to the interpretation of texts, but as an exemplification of and commentary upon the principles of art; if you look upon the literature of a people as a chapter in the development of the human mind, if you work out this in a broad spirit, and with such collateral references to morals and politics, and physical geography, and the like as are needful to make you comprehend what the meaning of ancient literature and civilisation is,—­then, assuredly, it affords a splendid and noble education.  But I still think it is susceptible of improvement, and that no man will ever comprehend the real secret of the difference between the ancient world and our present time, unless he has learned to see the difference which the late development of physical science has made between the thought of this day and the thought of that, and he will never see that difference, unless he has some practical insight into some branches of physical science; and you must remember that a literary education such as that which I have just referred to, is out of the reach of those whose school life is cut short at sixteen or seventeen.