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Rh manner of life far more complex, and it will be admitted that here we have a subject well worthy of systematic and regular treatment. These are not topics that can be handled satisfactorily in the idle leisure of a summer tour, in a long vacation. They deserve that a far more steady attention should be devoted to them. Let this first be recognized fully—the importance, which cannot be exaggerated, of a kind of study in which no man in England has had a regular training—and then we may proceed to consider the method by which this study may be raised to the prominence which it deserves. That there are difficulties in the way of its assuming this position is not to be denied. It will be the endeavor of the present essay to remove, not the whole of these difficulties, but so many of them as bar the way to any practical consideration of the subject in its entirety.

First, however, it is necessary to consider what is actually done at our schools and universities toward giving students a knowledge of modern languages and literatures. It is a little curious that the question excites more attention in relation to schools than in relation to the universities. Already, there is hardly any (if any) school of high rank in the country in which French, at least, does not form a regular part of the instruction. Whereas at the universities there are only incidental exceptions to the general neglect with which the subject is treated. And this very fact shows that the whole significance of the question is misunderstood. As languages, French and German (especially the former) are less powerful instruments of training, for the abler boys, than Latin and Greek. As literatures—that is, as summing up the whole thought and history of a nation—they would, if properly managed, be much more powerful instruments (in proportion to the much greater variety of modern life as compared with ancients), and are, besides, much more important for us to know. Now, school-boys have more need to apply themselves to languages as languages than to the wide field of information comprised in a literature; for linguistic study gives a constant yet not too fatiguing exercise to the intellect, an exercise quite indispensable in the first formation of the mind, without demanding on the part of the student any experience of actual realities. And this is the principal benefit gained at present in schools by the study of French and German, that the slower boys have something more within the range of their capacity than they had formerly; a benefit which, though it may in time receive augmentation, is in itself no inconsiderable gain. At the universities, however, the importance of linguistic study, as compared with material study, is much less. A youth of twenty will have the fibre of his mind, his actual mental grasp and capacity, in a great measure, determined; it is not so important, though it is not unimportant, that he should be subjected to an incessant intellectual stimulus. On the other hand, he will now begin for the first time to take an interest in a variety of topics; knowledge will seem to him worth acquiring for its own sake;