Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/98

88 lives of our great writers, and with the opinions of other men about their works.

The student must go directly to the literature and study its masterpieces in their original forms, with the very spelling and punctuation of the authors. Study each work in the most thorough way: study every part, every sentence, every line, every word: study every allusion, every illustration, every figure: study every thought, every opinion, every argument: study every fact in the author's life, every fact in the history of his time, that will help in any way to an understanding and appreciation of the work. No book of extracts should be used, A work of genius must be studied as a whole. If you can give but a few days to a writer, study some entire short work in preference to using extracts from larger works. A student will get far more profit out of Milton's "Lycidas" studied in this way than from going through "Paradise Lost" in the ordinary way.

Take a play of Shakespeare—what an instrument for the highest culture! How rich the rewards of diligent labor in this mine! What more inspiring thing is possible for a human mind than to be brought so near to the foremost mind of all this world's history? I am not disposed to undervalue the grand literatures of Greece and Rome; they mark the highest tide of human thought in the old-world civilization; and yet, in their combined worth, they are outvalued by Shakespeare alone—without counting in the worth of Chaucer, Langland, Spenser, Bacon, Hooker, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson—may the roll stretch out "to the crack of doom!" How unwise in us, in our anxiety to teach our children the language of Plato and Cicero, to leave them in ignorance of the language of their own forefathers! I trust the time will speedily come when no man or woman, who is unable to read at sight a page of English of any age from Alfred to Victoria will be considered liberally educated, whatever else he or she may know.

Certainly much has been done in the last ten years to encourage us. In the time of Richard II., in 1385, English was admitted into English schools as a teaching medium: the close of our century will witness its full admission into English and American schools as a teaching subject. The future historian will record the significant fact that in our age the boys and girls of England and America were for the first time instructed carefully in the great classics of their mother-tongue—that they knew Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Bacon, as the boys and girls of Greece knew Homer, and Sophocles, and Plato.

Greek itself was admitted, as a subject of study, into the English universities in the sixteenth century, only after a long and fierce battle between the Greeks and the Trojans of that day. "There were many, then, who from various points of view echoed the sentiment expressed by the Duke of Norfolk in 1540.‘I never read the Scripture,’ said that adherent of the departing age,‘nor never will read it. It was