Very few words will suffice by way of Preface to the following pages. Although this Essay is inconsiderable in extent, and intentionally written in a familiar and informal style, it contains the results of no slight experience and reflexion on the subjects of which it treats. Indeed, I have had many opportunities of discussing these matters before now, and I have often had to repeat in the present Treatise the thoughts, sometimes the very words, which I have used in fugitive publications or in public speeches and lectures. But the confidence, with which I bring forward this advocacy of the old basis of liberal education, does not spring merely from the maturity of my own convictions. I know also that most of those, who have paid adequate attention to the questions mooted by me, take the same view, either wholly or in part, and I have often, for obvious reasons, quoted passages from the writings of others, instead of endeavouring to enforce the same opinions by words of my own. One of my chief objects has been to correct prevalent, especially recent, exaggerations. And I venture to hope that, while those, who have not considered all the bearings of the questions raised in these pages, may be induced, by a few candid and dispassionate arguments, to abstain from a precipitate depreciation of learning in general, and of Oxford and Cambridge learning in particular, those, who have it in their power to make our School and University teaching all that it ought to be, will not, for the want of the necessary corrections and additions, allow the whole system to suffer judgment before the tribunal of public opinion.