ly more offensive than honest and manly ignorance,
has usurped the place which was formerly occupied by genuine and liberal
learning. A vast deal of specialism, "mugged up," as boys say, at the
British Museum or the London Library, may coexist with a profound
ignorance of all that is really worth knowing. It sounds very
intellectual to chatter about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, or to
scoff at St. John's "senile iterations and contorted metaphysics"; but,
when a clergyman read St. Paul's eulogy on Charity, instead of an
address, at the end of a fashionable wedding, one of his hearers said,
"How very appropriate that was! Where did you get it from?" Everyone can
patter nonsense about the traces of Bacon's influence in _The Merry
Wives of Windsor_, and can ransack their family histories for the
original of "Mr. W. H." But, when _Cymbeline_ was put on the stage,
Society was startled to find that the principal part was not a woman's.
When some excellent scenes from Jane Austen were given in a Belgravian
drawing-room, a lady of the highest notoriety, enthusiastically praising
the performance, enquired who was the author of the dialogue between Mr.
and Mrs. John Dashwood, and whether he had written anything else. I have
known a Lord Chief Justice who had never seen the view from Richmond
Hill; a publicist who had never heard of Lord Althorp; and an authoress
who did not know the name of Izaak Walton.

Perhaps these curious "ignorances," as the Prayer Book calls them,
impressed me the more forcibly because I was born a Whig, and brought up
in a Whiggish society; for the Whigs were rather specially the allies of
learning; and made it a point of honour to know, though never to parade,
the best that has been thought and written. Very likely they had no
monopoly of culture: the Tories may have been just as well-informed. But
a man "belongs to his belongings"; one can only describe what one has
seen; and here the contrast between Past and Present is palpable
enough. I am not thinking of professed scholars and students, such as
Lord Stanhope the Historian, and Sir Edward Bunbury the Senior Classic;
or of professed blue-stockings, such as Barbarina, Lady Dacre, and
Georgiana, Lady Chatterton; but of ordinary men and women of good family
and good position, who had received the usual education of their class,
and had profited by it.

Mr. Gladstone used to say that, in his schooldays at Eton, a boy might
learn much, or learn not