writer of a past age with merely modern conceptions; and, therefore,
that if such a man's works are worth study at all, they must be read
with the help of the light thrown upon them by contemporary history,
literature, laws, and morals. The student must endeavour to divest
himself, as far as possible, of all ideas that are the result of a
development subsequent to the time in which his author lived, and to
place himself in harmony with the life and thoughts of the people of
that age: sit down with them in their homes, and learn the sources of
their loves, their hates, their fears, and see wherein domestic
happiness, or lack of it, made them strong or weak; follow them to the
market-place, and witness their dealings with their fellows--the honesty
or baseness of them, and trace the cause; look into their very hearts,
if it may be, as they kneel at the devotion they feel or simulate, and
become acquainted with the springs of their dearest aspirations and most
secret prayers.

7. A hard discipline, no doubt, but not more hard than salutary.
Salutary in two ways. First, as a test of the student's own earnestness
of purpose. For in these days of revival of interest in our elder
literature, it has become much the custom for flippant persons, who are
covetous of being thought "well-read" by their less-enterprising
companions, to skim over the surface of the pages of the wisest and
noblest of our great teachers, either not understanding, or
misunderstanding them. "I have read Chaucer, Shakspere, Milton," is the
sublimely satirical expression constantly heard from the mouths of those
who, having read words set down by the men they name, have no more
capacity for reading the hearts of the men themselves, through those
words, than a blind man has for discerning the colour of flowers. As a
consequence of this flippancy of reading, numberless writers, whose
works have long been consigned to a well-merited oblivion, have of late