d to attempt might be a scholar, but he would not be considered so
He might be a thorough scholar in French and English,--that is, he
might possess the cream of two great literatures,--but he would be
spoken of as a person of defective education. It is the fashion, for
example, to speak of Sir Walter Scott as a half-educated man, because he
did not know much Greek, yet Sir Walter had studied German with success,
and with his habit of extensive reading, and his immense memory,
certainly knew incomparably more about the generations which preceded
him than Horace knew of those which preceded the Augustan era.

The privilege of limiting their studies, from the beginning, to one or
two branches of knowledge, belonged to earlier ages, and every
successive accumulation of the world's knowledge has gradually lessened
it. Schoolboys in our time are expected to know more, or to have
attempted to learn more, than the most brilliant intellectual leaders of
former times. What English parent, in easy circumstances, would be
content that his son should have the education of Alcibiades, or an
education accurately corresponding to that of Horace, or to that which
sufficed for Shakespeare? Yet although the burdens laid upon the memory
have been steadily augmented, its powers have not increased. Our brains
are not better constituted than those of our forefathers, although where
they learned one thing we attempt to learn six. They learned and we
attempt to learn. The only hope for us is to make a selection from the
attempts of our too heavily burdened youth, and in those selected
studies to emulate in after-life the thoroughness of our forefathers.

LETTER III

TO A FRIEND WHO STUDIED MANY THINGS.

An idealized portrait--The scholars of the sixteenth century--Isolated
students--French students of English when isolated from
Englishmen--How one of them read Tennyson--Importance of
sounds--Illusions of scholarship--Difficulty of appreciating the
sense--That Latin may still be made a spoken language--The early
education of Montaigne--A contemporary instance--Dream of a Latin
island--Rapid corruption of a language taught artificially.

In your answer to my letter about the multiplicity of modern studies you
tell me that my portrait of your grandfather is considerably idealized,
and that, notwithstanding all the respect which you owe to his memory,
you have convincing proof in his manuscript annotations to Latin authors
that