Men may not only go through the whole curriculum of a university
education, but take high honours in it, without the least intellectual
advantage beyond the acquisition of a few quotations. This is not, of
course (good heavens!), because the classics have nothing to teach us
in the way of poetical ideas, but simply because to the ordinary mind
the acquisition of a poetical idea is very difficult, and when conveyed
in a foreign language is impossible. If the same student had given the
same time--a monstrous thought, of course, but not impracticable--to
the cultivation of Shakespeare and the old dramatists, or even to the
more modern English poets and thinkers, he would certainly have got
more out of them, though he would have missed the delicate
suggestiveness of the Greek aorist, and the exquisite subtleties of the
particle _de_. Having acquired these last, however, and not for
nothing, it is not surprising that he should esteem them very highly,
and, being unable to popularise them at dinner-parties and the like, he
falls back upon praise of the classics generally.

Such are the circumstances which, more particularly in this country,
have led to a well-nigh universal habit of literary lying--of a
pretence of admiration for certain works of which in reality we know
very little, and for which, if we knew more, we should perhaps care
even less.

There are certain books which are standard, and as it were planted in
the British soil, before which the great majority of us bow the knee
and doff the cap with a reverence that, in its ignorance, reminds one
of fetish worship, and, in its affectation, of the passion for High
Art. The works without which, we are told at book auctions, 'no
gentleman's library can be considered complete,' are especially the
objects of this adoration. The 'Rambler,' for example, is one of them.