n the whole,
whatever may be the ability and the zeal of the teacher, this is in my
humble judgment neither very surprising nor particularly mortifying,
if we think what history in the established conception of it means.
How are we to expect workmen to make their way through constitutional
antiquities, through the labyrinthine shifts of party intrigue at
home, and through the entanglements of intricate diplomacy
abroad--'shallow village tales,' as Emerson calls them? These studies
are fit enough for professed students of the special subject, but such
exploration is for the ordinary run of men and women impossible, and I
do not know that it would lead them into very fruitful lands even if
it were easy. You know what the great Duke of Marlborough said: that
he had learnt all the history he ever knew out of Shakespeare's
historical plays. I have long thought that if we persuaded those
classes who have to fight their own little Battles of Blenheim for
bread every day, to make such a beginning of history as is furnished
by Shakespeare's plays and Scott's novels, we should have done more to
imbue them with a real interest in the past of mankind, than if we had
taken them through a course of Hume and Smollett, or Hallam on the
English Constitution, or even the dazzling Macaulay. What I for one
should like to see in such an institution as this, would be an attempt
to compress the whole history of England into a dozen or fifteen
lectures--lectures of course accompanied by catechetical instruction.
I am not so extravagant as to dream that a short general course of
this kind would be enough to go over so many of the details as it is
desirable for men to know, but details in popular instruction, though
not in study of the writer or the university professor, are only
important after you have imparted the largest general truths. It is
the general truths that stir a life-like curiosity as to the
particulars which they are the means of lighting up. Now this short
course would be quite enough to present in a bold outline--and it need
not be a whit the less true and real for being both bold and
rapid--the great chains of events and the decisive movements that have
made of ourselves and our institutions what we and what they are--the
Teutonic beginnings, the Conquest, the Great Charter, the Hundred
Years' War, the Reformation, the Civil Wars and the Revolution, the
Emancipation of the American Colonies from the Monarchy. If this
course we