Page:The Outline of History Vol 2.djvu/448

 intellectual life, and shrank to be merely the educational preserves of the aristocracy and the church. Jews, Roman Catholics, dissenters, sceptics, and all forms of intellectual activity were carefully barred out from those almost extinguished lamps of learning. Their mathematical work was poor, a series of exercises in the mere patience-games and formulæ-writing of lower mathematics; science they despised and excluded, and their staple training was the study, without any archæology or historical perspective, of the more rhetorical and "poetic" of the Latin and Greek classics. Such a training prepared men not so much to tackle and solve the problems of life, as to plaster them over with more or less apt quotations. It turned the mind away from living contemporary things; it showed the world reflected in a distorting mirror of bad historical analogies; all the fated convergencies of history were refracted into false parallels. The British Parliament was thought of as a Senate, statesmen postured as patricians and equestrians; the new industrial population, now learning to read and think for itself, was transfigured into the likeness of the illiterate savage and privileged citizen mob of later republican Rome. It