me of you, for example,
revolt from the broad plenty of Dickens (Heaven forgive you) or
the ornament of Tennyson. Some of the great writers of that age
definitely excluded God from their scheme of things: others
included God fiercely, but with circumscription and limitation. I
think it fair to say of them generally that they hated alike the
mystical and the mysterious, and, hating these, could have little
commerce with such poetry as Crashaw's and Vaughan's or such
speculation as gave ardour to the prose of the Cambridge
Platonists. Johnson's famous attack, in his "Life of Cowley,"
upon the metaphysical followers of Donne ostensibly assails their
literary conceits, but truly and at bottom rests its quarrel
against an attitude of mind, in respect of which he lived far
enough removed to be unsympathetic yet near enough to take
denunciation for a duty. Johnson, to put it vulgarly, had as
little use for Vaughan's notion of poetry as he would have had
for Shelley's claim that it

feeds on the aereal kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses,

and we have only to set ourselves back in Shelley's age and read
(say) the verse of Frere and Canning in "The Anti-Jacobin," to
understand how frantic a lyrist--let be how frantic a political
figure--Shelley must have appeared to well-regulated minds.

VII

All this literature which our forefathers excluded has come back
upon us: and concurrently we have to deal with the more serious
difficulty (let us give thanks for it) of a multitude of millions
insurgent to handsel their long-deferred heritage. I shall waste
no time in arguing that we ought not to wish to withhold it,
because we cannot if we would. And thus the problem becomes a
double one, of _distribution_ as well as of _selection._

Now in the first place I submit that this _distribution_ should
be free: which implies that our _selection_ must be confined to
books and methods of teaching. There must be no picking and
choosing among the recipients, no appropriation of certain forms
of culture to certain 'stations of life' with a tendency,
conscious or unconscious, to keep those stations as stationary as
possible.

Merely by clearing our purpose to this extent we shall have made
no inconsiderable advance. For even the last century never quite
got rid of its predecessor's fixed idea that certain degrees of
culture were appropriate to certain stations of life. With what
gentle persistence it prevails, fo