and readiness to help forward what he thought likely to do good.
"… How great are the delights, and how salutary the effect of the boyish ardour for honourable and lovely objects, which good poetry inspires! It is a great mistake to think that education is designed only to make perfect reflecting machines, although it is most true that nothing can be done rightly without reflection; but the feelings are part of our moral nature, intended to give an impulse to action, and they must be cultivated by teaching. Children must be taught to feel aright, by having right objects set before them, and having their feelings called forth towards them in the proper manner and degree.
"By this means they will be trained early to love what is good and hate what is evil, and will have chosen their part before they are called on to act: they will come into the world with their hearts already enlisted on one side, the partisans of all that is good and amiable. And this is to be done in part by the use of poetry: poetry is the language of feeling, and speaks to the feelings, and he who often uses this language learns to feel thus himself. … I would, therefore, propose the introducing of English poetry into your schools, as being likely to do good in many ways. First, it would be most powerful in forming the taste and feelings, as has been shown. Next, it would be of service for the purpose mentioned before, that which first led me to speak of it, namely, it would promote the knowledge of the English tongue in the purest form. We might think that a boy who had ever learnt a hundred lines of Spenser by heart in his life would be safe from most of the common vulgarisms heard in our provinces. … To carry the plan here recommended into execution, we must find poets fit for reading and learning in the manner proposed. I do not think this would cause any difficulty. Selections might be easily made. We might begin with Spenser and Shakspeare, for we need not go farther back than these; the older poets would be unintelligible. All of Spenser might be read, unless where too hard. Shakspeare is an inexhaustible mine for selection. Some of Milton. These would do for the elder boys only. Many of the moral poets, as Young, Akenside, Collins, Beattie, and a little of Pope, &c., might be taken in. Then for the younger readers, the delight of childhood, Cowper; and the rural poets, as Thomson and others."[1]
Literature awakens Mental Power.
The value of literature is becoming more appreciated throughout all ranks of society in England; and surely in one sense it is more needed by the man of business than by any other class. Nor can there be a greater mistake than to suppose that any one will be a worse man of business for cultivating the general powers of his mind and heart. And if, in any case, the highest works of the human mind should fail of their true end, and be degraded by ministering to vulgar display and self-inflation—as in this poor world of ours "noblest things find vilest using"—the blame must be laid, not on the books, but on some defect in the character or moral training of the reader. A healthy literature, well studied, should make a man modest, because it introduces him to real greatness; and it should incite him to be
- ↑ Letter to T. D. Acland, Esq., M.P., on the System of Education to be established in the Diocesan Schools for the Middle Classes, by the Rev. Robert Hussey, B.D. 1839.—pp. 29, 35.
