justification, in this city at any rate, for the old saying which
described America as the most common-schooled and least educated country
in the world. If we must draw distinctions, I should say that the effect
of the American system of university education was to raise the level
of general culture, while lowering the standard of special scholarship.
I believe that the general American tendency is to insist less than we
do on sheer mental discipline for its own sake, whether in classics or
mathematics, to allow the student a wider latitude of choice, and to
enable him to specialise at an earlier point in his curriculum upon the
studies he most affects, or which are most likely to be directly useful
to him in practical life. Thus the American universities, probably, do
not turn out many men who can "read Plato with their feet on the hob,"
but many who can, and do, read and understand him as Colonel Newcome
read Cæsar--"with a translation, sir, with a translation." The width of
outlook which I have noted as characteristic of literary New York is
deliberately aimed at in the university system, and most successfully
attained. The average young man of parts turned out by an American
university has a many-sided interest in, and comprehension of, European
literature and the intellectual movement of the world, which may go far
to compensate for his possible or even probable inexpertness in Greek
aorists and Latin elegiacs.

The academic and literary New Yorker, I am well aware, is not "the
American." But who is "the American?" I turn to Mr. G.W. Steevens, and
find that "the American is a highly electric Anglo-Saxon. His
temperament is of quicksilver. There is as much difference in vivacity
and emotion between him and an Englishman as there is between an
Englishman and an Italian." Well, Mr. Steevens is a keener observer than
I; when he wrote this, he had been two months in America to my one; and
he had travelled far and wide over the continent. I am not rash enough,