by which the modern scholar is trained up, selected the vernacular tongue of the pupil himself, as one of the concurrent branches of knowledge to be pursued in order to a harmonious mental development, because it furnishes an element needed in modern culture, and derivable from no other source. They "yoked," as has been said of the edu cation of Leibnitz, "all the sciences abreast," that the mind might be subjected to the widest possible intellectual influence, and, by binding the ancient and the modern world together, threw in upon the modern scholar the combined influence of both.

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The difference between the ancient and the modern mind, is exhibited in the following extract from Coleridge, with remarkable comprehensiveness and conciseness. "The Greeks," he says, "idolized the finite, and therefore were the masters of all grace, elegance, proportion, fancy, dignity, majesty; of whatever in short, is capable of being definitely conveyed by defined forms or thoughts; the moderns revere the infinite, and affect the indefinite as a vehicle of the infinite; hence their passions, their obscure hopes and fears, their wandering through the unknown, their grander moral feelings, their more august conception of man as man, their future rather than their past, in a word, their sublimity." But this native difference has been still more increased by the influence which Christianity has exerted upon the modern world, and the new species of development that has been introduced thereby. Consequently it is only a particular and peculiar element of culture, and not the entire culture itself, which the modern is to derive from the cultivated pagan. It is the form only, and not the matter, of literature, that is to be furnished by the Greek and Roman. The Christian world cannot go back to the pagan for ideas and thoughts. The humblest modern mind that lives within the pale of revelation, moves in a sphere of thought and feeling, infinitely transcending that of the loftiest heathen sage. It is not, therefore, for information and for living force, that the

1 Works, Vol. IV. p. 29.

modern devotes himself, as he has ever since the revival of classical learning, to the study of the beautiful models of Greece and Rome. The function of classical discipline is æsthetic.

On the other hand, the modern mind is full of matter, and overfull of force. It is not naturally master of itself or its materials. Its vitality and energy require direction and a serene flow. The Goth needs to become an artist. Hence the coöperation of the Pagan with the Christian in the process of modern education; a coöperation that will be benefi- cial, only so long as the former is confined to its proper function of refinement, and justifiable, only in proportion as the latter does not permit its vigor and vitality to be killed out by the seductive grace of the former. Upon the due proportion and the right mingling of the aesthetic element derived from classical literature, with the philosophical and theological elements derived from the world of modern Christian thought, depend the harmony and perfection of modern education. For if the form and the grace become predominant to the neglect of the idea and the thought, the vitality and the force, culture becomes formal, artificial, and spiritless. It will not even make the impression of the model itself, to which it has been so servile. It will exhibit the symmetry, and finish, and elegance of the works of the Grecian and Roman mind, in the manner of a mere copyist, and with none of the genuine classic feeling and spirit. The peculiar vigor and energy which characterize modern literature, and which must characterize it, in order that it may produce a permanent impression upon the modern mind, will be wanting in the productions of such an unvivified classicality, and they will be out of place in the midst of all the motion and energy of the modern world.

For proof of this, we need only look at those periods in the history of literature, which were marked by an exclusive devotion to classical studies, to the neglect of modern thought. The eighteenth century was a period in English literary history, characterized by excessive classicism. The elder literature of England was greatly neglected and under

valued, by the literary men of this period. The English mind during this century having almost no communication with the modern European mind, contented itself with a by no means genial and reproductive, but servile and mechan. ical, study of Greek and Roman models. Much is said of the influence of French models, and canons of criticism, up on this period in English literary history; but what were the French models themselves, but cold copies of the classic age, with no modern new-born life in them; and what were the canons of criticism but the substantially correct rules of ancient art mechanically applied, and that too under totally different circumstances, and amidst entirely foreign rela tions? For as Schiller truly remarks: "the French, wholly misapprehending the spirit of the ancients, introduced upon the stage a unity of place and time, according to the common empirical sense of the terms, as if in the drama, there could be any other place than mere ideal space, and any other time, than the mere steady progress and sequence of the action." 2

The truth is, the literary men of such periods started from the wrong point of departure. Instead of generating within themselves the stuff and material of literature, and employing classical culture as a formal or instrumental agency, in order to the symmetrical and finished presentment of it, they isolated themselves from the great process and movement of modern thought, violently threw themselves back into the ante-christian world, and sought the matter, where they should have sought only the form, of literature. The result ought not to surprise us. For a genuine literature, one that

1 The estimate in which Shakspeare was held by a mind like David Hume, is an example in point. The criticisms of Johnson, meritorious as his services in other respects were in regard to the earlier English literature, display little profound sympathy with the elder English spirit, as one feels on passing from them to the English and German criticism of the present century. The endeavor of Addison, in the Spectator, to awaken an interest in Milton and the Old Ballads, though more appreciative and genial than that of any other critic of the eighteenth century, was on the whole a failure, so far as the popular mind of that day is concerned.

2 Ueber den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie.

is destined to live in other ages, and to impress other nations, can originate only in the midst of present, actual, realities; only in the stir and throng of daily interests and feelings; only in the most intense and concentrated nationality. The training, the elaboration, the stimulation, may be brought from foreign climes, and from all ages, but the central root must grow up out of native soil.1

The proper method of counteracting the tendency to Formalism, which seems to be as natural in literature as it is in morals, is, not to give up the study of the great ancient masters and models of Form, but, along with this study, and coincident with it, to pursue with equal thoroughness and diligence, the study of modern literature. And inasmuch as, in most instances, a selection must be made from the several literatures that are comprised within this denomination, there are strong reasons for the selection of that of England.

(1) In the first place, the English literature is the most universal and generic in its character of the literatures of modern Europe. It may be regarded as the one, among them all, in which the distinctive peculiarities of the modern mind have found the most full and forcible expression. For the English race itself is the most comprehensive of any. It is a mixture and cross of all the best of the modern stocks. At the bottom of it lies the Celtic, a portion of that great Scythian people which was the first to move westward from Central Asia, the cradle and birthplace of the human family. Judging from the relics of it, still to be found among the mountains of Wales, the highlands of Scotland, the bleak

1 All the modern endeavors to revive the Pagan culture have failed, because they were attempts to find the principle and substance of literature in a stage of human history that has had its day, and which cannot, therefore, furnish anything beyond the artistic and the formal. A return to the culture and poetic Polytheism of the classic world, such as Shelley strove for, and Schiller yearns after in his poem entitled: Die Götter Griechenlands, would be as impossible and irrational, as would be the attempt to reconstruct the Fauna, or reanimate the Flora, of the primitive geological periods. The history of the efforts of the New Platonics to revive Paganism in its religious aspects, is equally instructive with these attempts to revive it in its literary phase, and ought to be pondered by that small circle of religionists, of the present day, who seem to be repeating that futile endeavor.

and sterile district of Britanny in France, and in the eloquent and impetuous Irishman, it was a race eminently fitted to constitute the ground-work of a national character. Bold, fearless, and possessing an indomitable love of freedom, as the Commentaries of Cæsar evidence, the Briton still lives in the modern Englishman; and, by a singular yet natural coincidence, gives his name to England itself, whenever the elements of power and empire are sought to be made prominent. For they are "Britons who never will be slaves;" and it is Britannia who

Into this living and solid root was then grafted one of the very finest shoots of the great Germanic race-the Anglo-Saxon. The second wave of Asiatic emigration, thus rolled over upon the first, and mingled with it. Widely-differing national characteristics, originating in the same centre of the world, but separated by centuries of rude and savage, yet real and thorough, development during the various fortunes of emigration and warfare, of conflict with man and with material nature, were thus commingled in the Saxonized Briton. And, lastly, into the nation and character thus formed, an infusion of the Roman nature was introduced by the invasion and armed occupancy of the land by the Normans.

Constituted in this manner, the English mind became an exceedingly comprehensive one. Containing the qualities and characteristics of all the principal races that have made Europe their home, with the exception of the Sclavonic, a race which, perhaps, is to play an important part in the future history of the world, but which, as yet, has had no development, and, until recently, has been a mere cipher in European history-containing, we say, such widely-different and yet substantial characteristics, the English mind is the most adequate representative of the Universal-European or Modern Mind.