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 think, and to take delight in thinking; it is the keynote of subtle and animated talk. It presupposes a somewhat varied list of acquirements; but it has no official catalogue, and no market value. It emphatically does not consist in knowing inventories of things, useful or otherwise; still less in imparting this knowledge to the world. Macaulay, Croker, and Lord Brougham were men who knew things on a somewhat grand scale, and imparted them with impressive accuracy; yet they were the blight rather than the spur of conversation. Even the "more cultivated portion of the ignorant," to borrow a phrase of Stevenson's, is hostile to lectures, unless the lecturer has the guarantee of a platform, and his audience sits before him in serried and somnolent rows.

The decline and fall of the classics has not been unattended by controversy. No other educational system was ever so valiantly and nobly de-