the globe,
to connect their presence or their absence with the great geological,
climatic, and oceanic changes, so the student of literature, if he be
wise, undertakes an ordered and connected survey of ideas, of tastes,
of sentiments, of imagination, of humour, of invention, as they affect
and as they are affected by the ever changing experiences of human
nature, and the manifold variations that time and circumstances are
incessantly working in human society.

Those who are possessed, and desire to see others possessed, by that
conception of literary study must watch with the greatest sympathy and
admiration the efforts of those who are striving so hard, and, I hope,
so successfully, to bring the systematic and methodical study of our
own literature, in connection with other literatures, among subjects
for teaching and examination in the Universities of Oxford and
Cambridge. I regard those efforts with the liveliest interest and
sympathy. Everybody agrees that an educated man ought to have a
general notion of the course of the great outward events of European
history. So, too, an educated man ought to have a general notion of
the course of all those inward thoughts and moods which find their
expression in literature. I think that in cultivating the study of
literature, as I have perhaps too laboriously endeavoured to define
it, you will be cultivating the most important side of history.
Knowledge of it gives stability and substance to character. It
furnishes a view of the ground we stand on. It builds up a solid
backing of precedent and experience. It teaches us where we are. It
protects us against imposture and surprise.

Before closing I should like to say one word upon the practice of
composition. I have suffered, by the chance of life, many things from
the practice of composition. It has been my lot, I suppose, to read
more unpublished work than any one else in this room.

There is an idea, and, I venture to think, a very mistaken idea, that
you cannot have a taste for literature unless you are yourself an
author. I make bold entirely to demur to that proposition. It is
practically most mischievous, and leads scores and even hundreds of
people to waste their time in the most unprofitable manner that the
wit of man can devise, on work in which they can no more achieve even
the most moderate excellence than they can compose a Ninth Symphony
or paint a Transfiguration. It Is a terrible error to suppose that
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