f his land at the beginning of England's greatness, and such, within the
bounds of human frailty, has been the ideal even until now which the two
universities have held before them. Naturally the method of training
prescribed in the sixteenth century for the attainment of this goal is
antiquated in some of its details, but it is no exaggeration,
nevertheless, to speak of the _Boke Named the Governour_ as the very Magna
Charta of our education. The scheme of the humanist might be described in
a word as a disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination to the
end that the student may behold, as it were in one sublime vision, the
whole scale of being in its range from the lowest to the highest under the
divine decree of order and subordination, without losing sight of the
immutable veracity at the heart of all variation, which "is only the
praise and surname of virtue." This was no new vision, nor has it ever
been quite forgotten. It was the whole meaning of religion to Hooker, from
whom it passed into all that is best and least ephemeral in the Anglican
Church. It was the basis, more modestly expressed, of Blackstone's
conception of the British Constitution and of liberty under law. It was
the kernel of Burke's theory of statecraft. It is the inspiration of the
sublimer science, which accepts the hypothesis of evolution as taught by
Darwin and Spencer, yet bows in reverence before the unnamed and
incommensurable force lodged as a mystical purpose within the unfolding
universe. It was the wisdom of that child of Stratford who, building
better than he knew, gave to our literature its deepest and most
persistent note. If anywhere Shakespeare seems to speak from his heart and
to utter his own philosophy, it is in the person of Ulysses in that
strange satire of life as "still wars and lechery" which forms the theme
of _Troilus and Cressida_. Twice in the course of the play Ulysses
moralizes on the causes of human evil. Once it is in an outburst against
the devastations of disorder:

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names