age of literature was the truest picture of the history
of its day; and for this very reason English literature is the best
perhaps, the only teacher of English history, to women especially.
For it seems to me that it is principally by the help of such an
extended literary course, that we can cultivate a just and enlarged
taste, which will connect education with the deepest feelings of the
heart. It seems hardly fair, or reasonable either, to confine the
reading of the young to any certain fancied Augustan age of authors,
I mean those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; especially
when that age requires, in order to appreciate it, a far more
developed mind, a far greater experience of mankind and of the world,
than falls to the lot of one young woman out of a thousand. Strong
meat for men, and milk for babes. But why are we to force on any age
spiritual food unfitted for it? If we do we shall be likely only to
engender a lasting disgust for that by which our pupils might have
fully profited, had they only been introduced to it when they were
ready for it. And this actually happens with English literature: by
having the so-called standard works thrust upon them too early, and
then only in a fragmentary form, not fresh and whole, but cut up into
the very driest hay, the young too often neglect in after-life the
very books which then might become the guides of their taste. Hence
proceed in the minds of the young sudden and irregular revulsions of
affection for different schools of writing: and all revolutions in
the individual as well as in the nation are sure to be accompanied by
some dead loss of what has been already gained, some disruption of
feelings, some renunciation of principles, which ought to have been
preserved; something which might have borne fruit is sure to be
crushed in the earthquake. Many before me must surely have felt
this. Do none here remember how, when they first escaped from the
dry class-drudgery of Pope and Johnson, they snatched greedily at the
forbidden fruit of Byron, perhaps of Shelley, and sentimental novel-
writers innumerable? How when the luscious melancholy of their
morbid self-consciousness began to pall on the appetite, they fled
for refuge as suddenly to mere poetry of description and action, to
Southey, Scott, the ballad-literature of all ages? How when the
craving returned (perhaps unconsciously to themselves) to understand
the wondrous heart of man, they tried