ntenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful
studies. Moderation and judgment are, for most purposes, more than the
flash and the glitter even of the genius. I hope that your professors
of rhetoric will teach you to cultivate that golden art--the steadfast
use of a language in which truth can be told; a speech that is
strong by natural force, and not merely effective by declamation; an
utterance without trick, without affectation, without mannerisms,
without any of that excessive ambition which overleaps itself as
disastrously in prose writing as in so many other things.

I will detain you no longer. I hope that I have made it clear that we
conceive the end of education on its literary side to be to make a man
and not a cyclopaedia, to make a citizen and not an album of elegant
extracts. Literature does not end with knowledge of forms, with
inventories of books and authors, with finding the key of rhythm, with
the varying measure of the stanza, or the changes from the involved
and sonorous periods of the seventeenth century down to the _staccato_
of the nineteenth, or all the rest of the technicalities of
scholarship. Do not think I contemn these. They are all good things to
know, but they are not ends in themselves. The intelligent man, says
Plato, will prize those studies which result in his soul getting
soberness, righteousness, and wisdom, and he will less value the
others. Literature is one of the instruments, and one of the most
powerful instruments, for forming character for giving us men
and women armed with reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with
steadfastness and courage, and inspired by that public spirit and
public virtue of which it has been well said that they are the
brightest ornaments of the mind of man. Bacon is right, as he
generally is, when he bids us read not to contradict and refute, nor
to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but
to weigh and to consider. Yes, let us read to weigh and to consider.
In the times before us that promise or threaten deep political,
economical, and social controversy, what we need to do is to induce
our people to weigh and consider. We want them to cultivate energy
without impatience, activity without restlessness, inflexibility
without ill-humour. I am not going to preach to you any artificial
stoicism. I am not going to preach to you any indifference to money,
or to the pleasures of social intercourse, or to the esteem and
go