true; and yet neither may be of much service in education, if our application be misapplied and our accuracy relate to unessential matters. Besides, examination and competition stimulate those qualities in students whose memory and pertinacity are already sufficiently developed, while they dissatisfy those whose intelligence and taste lead them to seek in education

a higher aim. Competition-the insatiable ambition to surpass one's neighbour rather than oneself-is perhaps the worst enemy true education has. Its fruits are, in character vain-glory, and in intellect pedantry.

But the dangers of examinations are so trite a subject that we need do no more than refer to them. It is enough to indicate, in leaving dilettantism and pedantry, that each is what Carlyle would have called 'a missing of the point.'

It is not only that dilettantism and pedantry do no good. They do positive harm-and that, not only to our intellect,

but to our character. Like other kinds of idolatry, that is, setting up dead things and worshipping them as if they were living things, putting the letter in place of the spirit-they are forms of deception; and intellectual deception is closely allied to moral dishonesty. Those masquerades of true culture are inhumane,—or inhuman, to use the older form of the word when neither the meaning nor the spelling was differentiated. The Humanities or Humanity used to be the title applied to culture in Latin, when Latin was the language of the literature of Europe, before our nations had evolved each a literary language of its own. Now that we have a literature and language of our own, it would be well that the word were kept if only to remind us that education is not a substitute for our humanity, but a development of it. The seeds which true culture fosters never grow to bloom or fruit in the garden of either dilettante or pedant, for love is not there to tend

them, nor modesty and sincerity to prune their branches.

So far of the dangers. Is it possible to avoid them?

Can literature be made

a fit subject of University education? Can its study be undertaken so as to become the training of our judgment, intelligence and taste?

Most of you are aware that at present the most vexed question in education-I should perhaps say, English University education - turns on the question whether English Literature is or is not to form, along with Classical Literature, a part of the University curriculum and a subject of examination for University degrees. Professor Freeman has written an article in last month's Contemporary Review, in which he gives an emphatic answer to this question-in which he asserts that English Literature is not a subject for University training or examination, and gives his reasons.

1 Cont. Review, October, 1887.

for this assertion. As it was the reading of that article which first suggested to me the train of thought underlying my remarks to-day, allow me to say a word or two about it.

Professor Freeman's article specially relates to the appointment by himself and others, a year or so ago, not of a Professor of Literature, as one would have expected, but of a Professor of SemiSaxon, to a Chair of English Language and Literature recently founded at Oxford; in spite of the fact, that there were already in the University one Professor of Comparative Philology, another of Sanscrit, and another of AngloSaxon. It is not, however, to the policy of this appointment that I wish to draw your attention, but rather to the lines of argument on which the writer bases his assertion that Language is a fit subject of University training, and that Literature is not.

His argument may be epitomised as follows:

There is at present in the criticism of English literature and in the affecting of it as a study, a shallow unsystematic dilettantism, the only outcome of which is the expression of light and capricious opinions regarding one author as against another. For this reason, English literature is not a subject for scholastic examination. It is essentially a mere matter of individual taste, where there are next to no facts to go upon; where, therefore, it is not 'possible to say of two answers to a question that one is right and the other is wrong.' Philology, on the other hand, is all facts; it is a science, and is therefore eminently suitable for purposes of examination, for 'if the examined knows the facts of the matter in hand, it ought not to make the difference of a line either way whether his mere taste, his mere opinion, agrees with that of the Examiner or not.' I Our alternative lies between a

1 Cont. Review, lii. 563.