The merits and demerits of University Extension are a theme of which I have no knowledge. I have been invited to lecture to University Extensionists in the Feast of Reason, and, I hope, of other wares, which they hold at Oxford, but modesty compelled me to decline. A volume of a series of University Extension Manuals, a volume on the English Novel, lies before me, published by Mr. Murray, and written by Mr. Walter Raleigh. Before the University was extended, we had no manuals of the English Novel, and no lectures or examinations therein. That kind of topic was supposed to be discussed in Essay Societies, but nobody, or next to nobody, ever wrote essays for them. Such themes were occasionally set for Balliol Essays, a form of composition not taken seriously by the victims. And now, what is the use of a Manual about English novels? Do the readers of it read the novels with which it deals rather in a hurry? DO they read Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Haywood, Bluidy Mackenzie, Henry Mackenzie, and the rest? If they do not study, say, Miss Jane Porter, where is the use in their perusing a page about Miss Porter? Really her performances, and Mrs. Haywood's, and even Bluidy Mackenzie's, still more the gallant Aphra's, are no essential parts of education. I have a slight acquaintance with the authors, and say, without hesitation, that they may be dropped, though Aphra gets a laugh now and then. We had manuals of this kind, before the Universities were extended, on the History of Philosophy. Schwegler hurried us from Heraclitus to Hegel. But then we verily had to read Heraclitus, and all that ‘gallant company of gentlemen’ in whom Sidney Smith took no interest – we had to read them in the original Greek. So of the other philosophers (except the modern foreign thinkers); we read their books, we did not only read about them. If the Extension people also read ‘Euphues,’ ‘Urania,’ ‘Parthenissa,’ ‘David Simple,’ ‘Sukey Shandy,’ and the rest, well, so be it. For pleasure, I may prefer Empedocles. A genuine ghost, as a rule, is silent.