that in the place of some of the several specialists who will lecture
you so admirably on the Troubadours! How good to hear Mr. Frederic
Harrison (with some one to follow) adjusting all our living efforts to
the scale of the divine Comte, and Mr. Walkley and Mr. Herbert Paul
making it perfectly clear that a dead dog is better than a living lion,
by demonstrations on the lion. Criticism to-day is all too much in the
case of that doctor whose practice was deadly, indeed, but his post-
mortems admirable! No doubt such lectures would consist at times of
highly contentious matter, but what of that? There could be several
chairs. It would not be an impossible thing to set a few Extension
Lecturers afloat upon the same channel. We have now numerous courses of
lectures on the Elizabethan Dramatists and the evolution of the Miracle
Play, and the people who listen to this sort of thing will depart
straight away to recreate their souls in the latest triumph of vehement
bookselling. Why not base the literary education of people upon the
literature they read instead of upon literature that they are scarcely
more in touch with than with Chinese metaphysics? A few carefully
chosen pages of contemporary rubbish, read with a running comment, a
few carefully chosen pages of what is, comparatively, not rubbish, a
little lucid discussion of effects and probabilities, would do more to
quicken the literary sense of the average person than all the sham
enthusiasm about Marlowe and Spenser that was ever concocted. There are
not a few authors who would be greatly the better and might even be
subsequently grateful for a lecture upon themselves in this style. Let
no one say from this that the classics of our tongue are depreciated
here. But the point is, that for people who know little of history,
little of our language, whose only habitual reading is the newspaper,
the popular novel, and the sixpenny magazine, to plunge into the study
of works written in the language of a different period, crowded with
obsolete allusions, and saturated with obsolete ideas and extinct ways