Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/126

 few and good; but above all school teaching fair, honest, and thorough.

Further I do not think we need look. I do not anticipate Englishmen ever becoming a nation of researchers. We may come, more of us, to love investigation for its own sake, and to love the study of History for the very exercise that it furnishes to our powers, and for the new regions of interest which expand before us as we proceed. Such study must however continue to be the portion of comparatively few, the few who have leisure, or who have the love in such strength as to enable them to overcome all obstacles. On them I trust the coming age will look more kindly than the present; which has much praise for the mere material lesson, and worships the statuesque, the picturesque, and the dramatic, but certainly honours the inquirers, the researchers^ with a scanty meed. It is an old, old story. Some of you may remember the passage in Saint Augustine's Confessions, the story he tells of one who was asked how the Deity, being from everlasting, was employed before the heavens and the earth were made; the reply was 'joculariter,' the great doctor tells us, a very pretty repartee, 'Alta, inquit, scrutantibus gehennas parabat.' He was preparing, to put it gently, a limbo for the advocates of research. 'Haec non respondeo,' says Augustine; but there are people at all events in one house of parliament who seem to hold the same views: one is glad to see that their number is now reduced to twelve.