Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/22

 words is what he expands (in another page) into 'a training in the methods of investigation, in the use of original authorities, and in those auxiliary sciences which the Germans call Hilfswissenschaften. When we have narrowed down the meaning of the 'historical teaching of history' to this sense, I feel inclined to observe that to a certain extent we are so teaching history already, and that where we clearly are not, there is much to be said for the less ambitious programme that is at present followed. In short we agree on many things, but differ on the problem how far the Modern History School should be technical, how far general and merely educational in its scope. At the bottom any divergence that there may be between us comes from a slightly varied point of view on that old problem of the 'liberal education', what it is, and what it is not, which has already been (perhaps) debated too much in academic circles. It may be that I am prejudiced from having taken the old Literae Humaniores School before I turned my hand to history. I fear that I am still more prejudiced by having been engaged for more than twenty years in conducting all sorts and conditions of men up to, and through, the portals of the Examination Schools. Five years spent as a deputy professor have not eradicated the old tutorial virus from my system. It is from the standing-point of the college teacher, released at last from his dumbness and permitted for the first time to speak ex cathedra that I state my conclusion.

It is many years since an inaugural lecture was delivered to this University by a history professor who came to his post straight from bearing the burden and heat of the day as an ordinary college tutor. Dr. Stubbs reached the Regius Professorship from the leisure of a country vicarage; Freeman and Froude had spent the