as the very Magna Charta of our education.  The scheme of the humanist might be described in a word as a disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination to the end that the student may behold, as it were in one sublime vision, the whole scale of being in its range from the lowest to the highest under the divine decree of order and subordination, without losing sight of the immutable veracity at the heart of all variation, which “is only the praise and surname of virtue.”  This was no new vision, nor has it ever been quite forgotten.  It was the whole meaning of religion to Hooker, from whom it passed into all that is best and least ephemeral in the Anglican Church.  It was the basis, more modestly expressed, of Blackstone’s conception of the British Constitution and of liberty under law.  It was the kernel of Burke’s theory of statecraft.  It is the inspiration of the sublimer science, which accepts the hypothesis of evolution as taught by Darwin and Spencer, yet bows in reverence before the unnamed and incommensurable force lodged as a mystical purpose within the unfolding universe.  It was the wisdom of that child of Stratford who, building better than he knew, gave to our literature its deepest and most persistent note.  If anywhere Shakespeare seems to speak from his heart and to utter his own philosophy, it is in the person of Ulysses in that strange satire of life as “still wars and lechery” which forms the theme of Troilus and Cressida.  Twice in the course of the play Ulysses moralizes on the causes of human evil.  Once it is in an outburst against the devastations of disorder: 

  Take but degree away, untune that string,
  And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
  In mere oppugnancy:  the bounded waters
  Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
  And make a sop of all this solid globe: 
  Strength should be lord of imbecility,
  And the rude son should strike his father dead: 
  Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
  Between whose endless jar justice resides,
  Should lose their names, and so should justice too. 
  Then every thing includes itself in power,
  Power into will, will into appetite.

And, in the same spirit, the second tirade of Ulysses is charged with mockery at the vanity of the present and at man’s usurpation of time as the destroyer instead of the preserver of continuity: 

  For time is like a fashionable host
  That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
  And with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly,
  Grasps in the comer:  welcome ever smiles,
  And farewell goes out sighing.  O, let not virtue seek
  Remuneration for the thing it was;
  For beauty, wit,
  High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service,
  Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
  To envious and calumniating time.