of a full mind, penetrated with zest and
enjoyment. One followed the little rill of literary craftsmanship so
easily out of the plain to its high source among the hills, till I
wondered why on earth I had not been told some of these delightful
things long ago, that I might have seen how our great literature took
shape. Such scraps of knowledge as I possess fell into shape, and I
saw the whole as in a map outspread.

And then I realised that knowledge, if it was only rightly directed,
could be a beautiful and attractive thing, not a mere fuss about
nothing, dull facts reluctantly acquired, readily forgotten.

All children begin by wanting to know, but they are often told not to
be tiresome, which generally means that the elder person has no answer
to give, and does not like to appear ignorant. And then the time comes
for Latin Grammar, and Cicero de Senectute, and Caesar's Commentaries,
and the bewildered stripling privately resolves to have no more than
he can help to do with these antique horrors. The marvellous thing
seems to him to be that men of flesh and blood could have found it
worth their while to compose such things.

Erudition, great is thy sin! It is not that one wants to deprive the
savant of his knowledge; one only wants a little common-sense and
imaginative sympathy. How can a little boy guess that some of the most
beautiful stories in the world lie hid among a mass of wriggling
consonants, or what a garden lurks behind the iron gate, with [Greek:
blosko] and [Greek: moloumai] to guard the threshold?

I am not going here to discuss the old curriculum. "Let 'em 'ave it!"
as the parent said to the schoolmaster, under the impression that it
was some instrument of flagellation--as indeed it is, I look round my
book-lined shelves, and reflect how much of interest and pleasure
those parallel rows have meant to me, and how I struggled into the use
of them outside of and not because of my so-called education; and how
much they might mean to others if they had not been so conscientiously
bumped into paths of peace.

"Nothing," said Pater, speaking of art in one of his finest passages,
"nothing which has ever engaged the great and eager affections of men
and women can ever wholly lose its charm." Not to the initiated,
perhaps! But I sometimes wonder if anything which has been taught with
dictionary and grammar, with parsing and construing, with detention
and imposition, can ever wholly regain its charm. I am af