Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/193

Rh popular education written by a man of great talents. Truth compels me to bear my public testimony against his extravagant plan, which is that there is nothing which the poor should not be taught; they must not stop short of science. They must learn history in its widest extent; Goldsmith's Greece is nothing; he recommends Mitford, &c. Even the absurdity of the thing is most obvious; supposing they had money to buy such books, where would they find time to read them without the neglect of all business, and the violation of all duty. And where is all this to terminate? Only cast back your eye upon Athens, where the upper gallery pronounced sentence on Sophocles and Euripides, and an herbwoman could detect the provincial accent of a great philosopher. Yet was there ever a more turbulent, ungovernable rabble? St. Paul tells us how they spent their time. It was only to tell or to hear of some new thing. I have exerted my feeble voice to prevail on my few parliamentary friends to steer the middle way between the Scylla of brutal ignorance and the Charybdis of a literary education. The one is cruel, the other preposterous."

Consumption of time in light reading, in her own class, displeased her. "Thirty volumes of Sir Walter Scott's novels have in the succession of a very few years covered every table. Figure to yourself a large family, where everyone reads for himself, the thousands