hundred pages of titles and authors in simple enumeration! The
brain reels; it already suffers 'cerebral inconveniences.' But
stretch the list back to Chaucer, back through Chaucer to those
alleged prose writings in the Wessex dialect, then forward from
1785 to Wordsworth, to Byron, to Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson,
Browning, Meredith, even to this year in which literature still
lives and engenders; and the brain, if not too giddy indeed,
stands as Satan stood on the brink of Chaos--

Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross--

and sees itself, with him, now plumbing a vast vacuity, and anon
nigh-foundered, 'treading the crude consistence.'

The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to
_know_ it in any reputable sense of the word--let alone your
learning to write English--is, in short, impossible. And the
framers of the Statute, recognising this, have very sensibly
compromised by setting you to work on such things as 'the
Outlines of English Literature'; which are not Literature at all
but are only what some fellow has to say about it, hastily
summarising his estimates of many works, of which on a generous
computation he has probably read one-fifth; and by examining you
on (what was it all?) 'language, metre, literary history and
literary criticism,' which again are not Literature, or at least
(as a Greek would say in his idiom) escape their own notice being
Literature. For English Literature, as I take it, is _that which
sundry men and women have written memorably in English about
Life._ And so I come to my subject--the art of reading _that,_