of
thoroughness is nothing but an indolent resolve to make things easy
for the teacher, and, worse still, for the examiner. Live teaching is
hard work. It demands continual freshness and a mind alert. The
dullest man can hear irregular verbs, and with the book he knows
whether they are said right or wrong, but to take a text and show
what the passage means to the world, to reconstruct the scene and the
conditions in which it was written, to show the origins and the fruits
of ideas or of discoveries, demand qualities of a very different
order. The plea for thoroughness may no doubt be offered in perfect
sincerity. There are plenty of men, especially among those who desire
the office of a pedagogue, whose field of vision is constricted to a
slit. If they were painters their work would be in the slang of the
day, "tight." One small group of facts they see hard and sharp,
without atmosphere or value. Their own knowledge having no capacity
for extension, no width or relationship to the world at large, they
cannot imagine that breadth in itself may be a merit. Adepts in a
petty erudition without vital antecedents or consequences, they would
willingly see the world shrivel to the dimensions of their own
landscape.

Anticipating here the applause of the reforming party, to avoid
misapprehension let it be expressly observed that pedantry of this
sort is in no sense the special prerogative of teachers of classics.
We meet it everywhere. Among teachers of science the type abounds, and
from the papers set in any Natural Sciences Tripos, not to speak of
scholarship examinations of every kind, it would be possible to
extract question after question that ought never to have been set,
referring to things that need never have been taught, and knowledge
that no one but a pedant would dream of carrying in his head for a
week.

The splendid purpose which science serves is the inculcation of
principle and balance, not facts. There is something horrible and
terrifying in the doctrine so often preached, reiterated of course by
speaker after speaker at the "Neglect of Science" meeting, that
science is to be preferred because of its utility. If the choice were
really between dead classics and dead science, or if science is to be
vivified by an infusion of commercial, utilitarian spirit, then a
thousand times rather let us keep to the classics as the staple of
education. They at least have no "use." At least they hold the keys to
the glorio