convalescent patient--to feed him on strong meats, on
cavaire and truffles, and to omit the simple, wholesome, homely fare on
which, in his condition, health and efficient progress must in the main
depend.

How often has the young enquirer been imbued with a distaste for solid
literature by being compelled to read 'masterpieces' long before he was
able to appreciate their value, or even to comprehend their history! The
system at many of our schools is much to blame in this respect. There
are, we believe, comparatively few boys who acquire, until they seek it
for themselves, even the roughest general outline of the world's
history, to which their various episodic studies may be applied, so that
each may fall into its proper place and order. 'Periods' and 'Epochs'
are studied minutely and painfully, without any knowledge of the grand
structure of which they form but a single fragment; and history is too
often divorced from geography. A schoolboy is set to work on a play of
Aristophanes before he has made acquaintance with the social and
political movements of which Pericles and Cleon were the
representatives. He reads his Bible and his Homer, his Virgil and
Horace, his Caesar and Livy, but probably with the vaguest ideas of their
relations to one another, or their respective positions in the world's
chronology. Or it may be that the whole of one term is devoted to one or
two books of 'the Iliad' and 'the Odyssey,' 'the AEneid' or the 'Odes,'
which are ground out line by line and word by word, all the interest and
flavour of the complete work being inevitably and hopelessly dissipated
in the process. Even 'the college prizeman, and the college tutor cannot
read a chorus in the Trilogy but what his mind instinctively wanders on
optatives, choriambi, and that happy conjecture of Smelfungus in the
antistrophe.'[100] But certain books having to be got up for an
examination by the cramming process, the receptacle for all this
erudition only looks forward to the time when he may throw his Classics
behind the fire for ever. No book with the least pretention to permanent
value can be read purely by and for itself; inevitably it must draw on
the reader--if he be in any sense worthy of the name--from point to
point beyond its own immediate sphere, until he finds his interest
expanding and his tastes forming under a natural and rapid process of
evolution. Can any intelligent person read his Homer or his 'AEneid,' his
Boswell, his 'O