stern nations at the close of the fifteenth and the
beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time almost everything that
was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient
Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public
Instruction has hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of
Cicero and Tacitus; had they confined their attention to the old
dialects of our own island; had they printed nothing, and taught nothing
at the universities, but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and romances in
Norman French, would England have been what she now is? What the Greek
and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is
to the people of India. The literature of England is now more valuable
than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanscrit
literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors.
In some departments--in history, for example--I am certain that it is
much less so.

"Another instance may be said to be still before our eyes. Within the
last hundred and twenty years a nation which had previously been in
a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the
Crusades has gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk,
and has taken its place among civilised communities. I speak of Russia.
There is now in that country a large educated class, abounding with
persons fit to serve the state in the highest functions, and in no way
inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of
Paris and London. There is reason to hope that this vast Empire, which
in the time of our grandfathers was probably behind the Punjab, may, in
the time of our grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain
in the career of improvement. And how was this change effected? Not by
flattering national prejudices; not by feeding the mind of the young
Muscovite with the old woman's stories which his rude fathers had
believed; not by filling his head with lying legends about St. Nicholas;
not by encouraging him to study the great question, whether the world
was or was not created on the 13th of September; not by calling him 'a
learned native,' when he has mastered all these points of knowledge; but
by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest mass of
information had been laid up, and thus putting all that information
within his reach. The languages of western Europe civilised Russia. I
cannot doubt that they will d