and it is very important that his researches should be rightly directed. In a word, he is now ripe for understanding, or beginning to understand, more than a language—a literature, or the records of a nation. That he is ripe for so much as this is obvious from the fact that the students at our universities do learn more than the mere Latin and Greek of the classics—they learn the subject-matter of the books; and this, especially at Cambridge, is taking place more and more. When, then, we see that modern languages are studied at schools, and not at the universities, it is obvious that the question respecting them has been very incompletely apprehended; it has been quite forgotten that they are connected with a very wide and important field of knowledge.
It is, therefore, the study of modern literatures rather than the study of modern languages that is here discussed; and for this reason the question relates rather to universities than to schools. Let us, then, consider what is the value of those incidental exceptions to which allusion was made just now; what, in short, is the actual amount of instruction in modern periods given at the universities. In such examinations as the law and modern history examination at Oxford, the law tripos and the moral science tripos at Cambridge, a good deal of acquaintance with certain aspects of modern times is required. And there have been at Cambridge, at different times, proposals for a history tripos, to comprise all history, ancient and modern; proposals which, however, did not obtain any large acceptance, and were, perhaps, rather made by those who wished to see the historical element eliminated from the classical tripos than by those who wished to see it introduced anywhere else.
Those, however, who think that any or all of the examinations above-mentioned will give those who prepare for them an adequate acquaintance with the nations of the modern world, take a very mechanical view of that which is meant by a nation. Nations, like individuals, or rather much more than individuals, extend far beyond any particular line of their action. The most accurate student of the law and philosophy of modern times will not thereby know any thing about military, commercial, and educational systems. Nor is it reasonable to think that there can be a separate course of study for each separate branch of national existence. The branches are much too numerous; it is necessary that all but the few that are of most extreme importance should be combined in a general system, having its centre in that which is the voice of the nation, in that which comes nearest to the very heart and being of the nation, namely, the literature. It is quite possible in such a mode of study to go far beyond the mere littérateur, the dabbler in criticism and politics. However much it be true that the literature must be the centre, yet that the researches of the student should stop with the literature need not and ought not to be the case. To take a single instance from English authors. How full is Milton, both in his prose works and in his poetry, of allusions to
