body and substance belonging to it. In England, literary pretence is
more universal than elsewhere from our method of education. When young
gentlemen from ten to sixteen are set to study poetry (a subject for
which not one in a hundred has the least taste or capability even when
he reads it in his own language) in Greek and Latin authors, it is only
a natural consequence that their views upon it should be slightly
artificial. The youth who objected to the alphabet that it seemed
hardly worth while to have gone through so much to have acquired so
little, was exceptionally sagacious; the more ordinary lad conceives
that what has cost him so much time and trouble, and entailed so many
pains and penalties, must needs have something in it, though it has
never met his eye. Hence arises our public opinion upon the ancient
classics, which I am afraid is somewhat different from (what painters
term) the private view. If you take the ordinary admirer of Æschylus,
for example--not the scholar, but the man who has had what he believes
to be 'a liberal education'--and appeal to his opinion upon some
passage in a British dramatist, say Shakespeare, it is ten to one that
he shows not only ignorance of the author (the odds are twenty to one
about _that_), but utter inability to grasp the point in question; it
is too deep for him, and, especially, too subtle. If you are cruel
enough to press him, he will unconsciously betray the fact that he has
never felt a line of poetry in his life. He honestly believes that the
'Seven against Thebes' is one of the greatest works that ever were
written, just as a child believes the same of the 'Seven Champions of
Christendom.' A great wit once observed, when bored by the praises of a
man who spoke six languages, that he had known a man to speak a dozen,
and yet not say a word worth hearing in any one of them. The humour of
the remark, as sometimes happens, has caused its wisdom to be
underrated; for the fact is that, in very many cases, all the
intelligence of which a mind is capable is expended upon the mere