place of genius and glory; the teachers of ancient knowledge, who are still extant, had perused and compared the writings of their predecessors; nor can it fairly be presumed that any important truth, any useful discovery in art or nature, has been snatched away from the curiosity of modern ages.

I certainly do not ask you to subscribe to all that.  In fact when Gibbon asks us to remember gratefully ’that the mischances of time and accident have spared the classic works to which the suffrage of antiquity had adjudged the first place of genius and glory,’ I submit with all respect that he talks nonsense.  Like the stranger in the temple of the sea-god, invited to admire the many votive garments of those preserved out of shipwreck, I ask ’at ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post vota nuncupata perierunt?’—­ or in other words ‘Where are the trousers of the drowned?’ ’What about the “Sthenoboea” of Euripides, the “Revellers” of Ameipsias—­ to which, as a matter of simple fact, what you call the suffrage of antiquity did adjudge the first prize, above Aristophanes’ best?’

But of course he is equally right to this extent, that the fire consumed a vast deal of rubbish:  solid tons more than any man could swallow,—­let be, digest—­’read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.’  And that was in A.D. 642, whereas we have arrived at 1916.  Where would our voracious Alexandrian be to-day, with all the literature of the Middle Ages added to his feast and on top of that all the printed books of 450 years?  ‘Reading,’ says Bacon, ‘maketh a Full Man.’  Yes, indeed!

Now I am glad that sentence of Bacon falls pat here, because it gives me, turning to his famous Essay “Of Studies”, the reinforcement of his great name for the very argument which I am directing against the fallacy of those teachers who would have you use ‘manuals’ as anything else than guides to your own reading or perspectives in which the authors are set out in the comparative eminence by which they claim priority of study or indicate the proportions of a literary period.  Some of these manuals are written by men of knowledge so encyclopaedic that (if it go with critical judgment) for these purposes they may be trusted.  But to require you, at your stage of reading, to have even the minor names by heart is a perversity of folly.  For later studies it seems to me a more pardonable mistake, but yet a mistake, to hope that by the employ of separate specialists you can get even in 15 or 20 volumes a perspective, a proportionate description, of what English Literature really is.  But worst of all is that Examiner, who—­aware that you must please him, to get a good degree, and being just as straight and industrious as anyone else—­assumes that in two years you have become expert in knowledge that beats a lifetime, and, brought up against the practical impossibility of this assumption, questions you—­not on a little selected first-hand knowledge—­but on massed information which at the best can be but derivative and second-hand.