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26 almost to lead them to suppose that the best thing that modern society could aim at would be to return to the state of things which existed when the first crusade was projected. He may be in a state of utter ignorance of the antiquities or the law of England; he knows the laws and antiquities of Greece and Rome. The English laws and antiquities are bound up with our freedom and history, and are important to every day's business; but he knows about them nothing whatever. We have, I here say boldly, a literature unparalleled in the world. Which of our great classical authors is a young man required to read in order to attain the highest honours our educational institutions can give him? He studies in the most minute manner the ancient writings of Rome or Greece. But as for Chaucer and Spenser, or the earlier classics, the old dramatists, or the writers of the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and Charles I., he knows nothing of them; and the consequence is that our style is impoverished, and the noble old language of our forefathers drops out of use, while the minds of our young men are employed instead in stringing together scraps of Latin poets learned by heart, and making them into execrable hexameters. Then as for modern languages.—There is some feeble sort of attempt to teach them, but nothing effective; and yet surely, if English is to have a preference over modern languages, as it ought to have, modern languages ought to have a preference, as far as the practical affairs of life are concerned, over ancient languages. I have been with a party of half-a-dozen first-class Oxford gentlemen on the Continent, and not one spoke a word of French or German; and if the waiter had not been better educated than we, and known some other language than his own, we might all have starved. That is not nearly all, but that is enough. I think you will agree with me that, as Dr. Johnson said of the provisions in the Highland inn, the negative catalogue is very copious, and I therefore sum up what I have to say on this point by making this remark, that our education does not communicate to us knowledge, that it does not communicate to us the means of obtaining knowledge, and that