I am old-fashioned and prejudiced enough to believe that literature cannot be taught; that there is no earthly use in schools and classes, and, if I may say so in a purely Pickwickian sense, no use in professors of literature, as professors. As a man and a man of letters, the professor may be both useful and beautiful, and I rejoice to think that chairs (far too few) have been founded for the repose of these good beings. Had every man of letters a chair of literature wherein to sit and be instructive, what a good-Humoured set of mortals we should be! But adequate provision has not been made, and though, as a thinker, I deprecate the ‘teaching of literature,’ as a philanthropist, I wish that all my brethren were paid to teach it. Had pious founders taken this vision, our genus would not be irritable, and the ‘Ephemera Critica’ of Mr. Churton Collins would be a book with which a child might play. As things stand, it is perhaps deficient in mansuetude, though it deals with the teaching of ingenuous arts; too often by ‘careless professors.’

On a priori grounds, and also by virtue of personal experience, I do not believe in the teaching of literature. When at school I must have been one of the most literary of my young companions; indeed, as Scott said when a boy, ‘You can't think how ignorant these boys were.’ Like the rest, I went to an English class till I was fourteen, after which we were supposed to know all about English literature, and turned to higher things. Dismal hand-books about Gower and Lydgate were placed in our reluctant and grubby little fists. My memory is not soiled with any recollection of the con tents of these manuals. We were expected to read ‘The Task,’ by the ingenious Mr. Cowper; but I read ‘Tirocinium,’ a poem about the very worst boys, except those in ‘Stalky and Co.,’ who are yet more odious. And that is all the teaching in English literature that I and my contempo- raries ever received. Now, Shake speare had not even so much as a manual about Lydgate and Gower, nor had Spencer, or Milton, or Herrick, or Shelley, or Thackeray, or Tennyson.