grammar and verses are of course the survivals of the Renaissance, as
the precise fidelity to absurd spelling is the imitation of its proof
readers; the essay is the abridged form of the mediaeval disputation;
and only such genuine sympathy with Virgil or Tacitus, with Homer or
Plato as one in a thousand acquires, is truly Roman or Greek at all.
The religious instruction, however, re-interpreted by the mediaeval
Church or the Reformation, has still its strength in some of the best
elements of patriarchal literature; while the fairy tale, by which all
this superincumbent weight of learning is sometimes alleviated, is the
child's inheritance from the matriarchal order. Finally, the apple and
the ball, at the bottom of this whole burden of books, complete the
recapitulation; as the one, the raw fruit; the other, the ready missile,
of primeval man. Our child then is heir of all the ages more fully than
he or his teachers commonly realise. The struggle for mastery of the
schools is thus no temporary feud, but an unending battle; one destined
to increase rather than diminish; for in this there is the perpetual
clash of all the forces of good heredity and evil atavism, of all the
new variations also, healthy or diseases.



[Page: 113] D--THE APPLIED SOCIOLOGY OF THE PRESENT

The city and its children thus historically present a thoroughly
parallel accumulation of survivals or recapitulations of the past in the
present. Few types nowadays are pure, that is, keep strictly to their
period; we are all more or less mixed and modernised. Still, whether by
temporal or spiritual compulsion, whether for the sake of bread or
honour, each mainly and practically stands by his order, and acts with
the social formation he belongs to. Thus now the question of the