remarkable less for something he can take out of his wallet and exhibit
for knowledge, than for _being_ something, and that 'something,' a man of
unmistakable intellectual breeding, whose trained judgment we can trust
to choose the better and reject the worse.

But since this refining of the critical judgment happens to be less easy
of practice than the memorising of much that passes for knowledge--of
what happened to Harriet or what Blake said to the soldier--and far less
easy to examine on, the pedagogic mind (which I implore you not to
suppose me confusing with the scholarly) for avoidance of trouble tends
all the while to dodge or obfuscate what is essential, piling up
accidents and irrelevancies before it until its very face is hidden. And
we should be the more watchful not to confuse the pedagogic mind with the
scholarly since it is from the scholar that the pedagogue pretends to
derive his sanction; ransacking the great genuine commentators--be it a
Skeat or a Masson or (may I add for old reverence' sake?) an Aldis
Wright--fetching home bits of erudition, _non sua poma_, and announcing
'This _must_ be the true Sion, for we found it in a wood.'

Hence a swarm of little school books pullulates annually, all upside down
and wrong from beginning to end; and hence a worse evil afflicts us, that
the English schoolboy starts with a false perspective of any given
masterpiece, his pedagogue urging, obtruding lesser things upon his
vision until what is really important, the poem or the play itself, is
seen in distorted glimpses, if not quite blocked out of view.

This same temptation--to remove a work of art from the category for which
the author designed it into another where it can be more conveniently
studied--reaches even above the schoolmaster to assail some very eminent
critics. I cite an example from a book of which I shall hereafter have to