as of their own. If you would be useful in your day and generation, if you would leave the world a little better than you found it, make the acquaintance of great men in their books and never tire of their friendship. Oh the marvellous inheritance which they have left! the right to communionship with them in thought and, aye, in action too. To you, isolated as necessarily you often must be from your fellows, how great is this boon, how inestimable the blessings of the great legacies of thought which they have left with you. "Their works," writes Wordsworth,
Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood
Our pastime and our happiness will grow."
But although English is to you the gate of knowledge I would not have you rest on it alone. Your position is peculiar; it corresponds to that of the youth of the middle and renascent Ages who were taught in Latin only. But although this system has its disadvantages, it has this advantage that you have been taught to use this foreign tongue as the vehicle of all your reasoning processes—that is, it has been taught to you logically and accurately. You are therefore much less liable to mistake words for things.
But whilst English is all this to you remember that no cultivated man should rest content with a knowledge of one language only. The task of learning a language is much less to you than to an Englishman. Most of you know only English well, for your knowledge of your own Vernaculars from all accounts is but indifferent. Some few of you have passed in Sanscrit or in Latin. Three languages is the outside limit of your knowledge, whilst few English graduates do not possess a moderate knowledge of two classical and of at least one modern language besides their own. Your task in the way of learning languages seems to me always to have been overrated. Had the methods of instruction been good much more might have been required of you. Now I would urge each one of you, who has a facility for learning languages, to use some portion of your leisure in after-life in studying other languages besides English—especially modern European languages. It is true that you will rarely feel the need of French or German, as an Englishman feels it, for purposes of travel or of correspondence; but if you read, as I trust you will more and more English literature and English pamphlets and newspapers, I do not see how you are to appreciate such literature unless you know something of the languages
