sure their footing at every step of their progress, knew
thoroughly what they professed to know, and by books of
solid value, or by important discoveries in science, proved
their title to a place among the teachers and benefactors of
mankind.
The great principles by which our ancestors were guided
in these matters are eternally true. To turn out good men
and good citizens was their aim ; and, according to their
lights and their means, they spared no efforts to achieve it.
As regarded primary education, there was little room for
improvement. Whether, as time went on, and great changes
took place in the circumstances and the wants of the country,
the methods pursued in the higher education were always
the best, is not so clear.
Speaking from the experience of my own youth, the range
of studies was too limited, the methods of instruction were
faulty ; and too much, far too much, time was spent over
these studies, such as they were. "We were too early taken
away from learning the structure and the resources of our
own language, and from its stores of historical, biographical,
268 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
and other knowledge, which the opening mind of youth
could follow with interest, and assimilate with ease and
advantage ; and were sent to puzzle in a confused way over
Latin and Greek, to which many of the best years of our
youth were devoted, almost to the exclusion of every other
study. Never can I forget the hopeless weariness of those
long hours, spent by myself in the Edinburgh High School,
during six years, in learning badly what might easily, under
proper training, have been learned thoroughly in one-half
the time. The system was radically faulty ; for the pace
at which our knowledge advanced was regulated by the
idlers and the dunces, who, to say the least, formed a
tolerably liberal proportion of the much too large classes, of
which we were compelled to form a part.
What was the result ? As it cost a boy of fair intelli-
gence really no effort to acquire all that he was expected to
learn, and as no amount of attainment enabled him to
abridge the regular curriculum, the studies to which he was
fettered too often became to him an object of ennui and
disgust. Accordingly, it was only the boys of strong
character, who set up other subjects of study for themselves,
and so kept their minds fresh and active, who escaped un-
hurt from the evils of the system. But the injury to them
was not slight ; for at that age I hold that every hour lost
is a serious mischief, and the mischief is more serious when
the loss is linked by painful associations with studies that
should have brought only delight and profit. How many of
us felt what Byron so vigorously expressed in his farewell
to Horace, whom " he hated so " x The weary iteration of
lines badly construed and miserably translated under the
handling of a prosaic system, which did not even aim at
giving vitality to the poetry of our text-books, or creating a
human interest in either the men who wrote it or the people
of whose soul it was the finest expression, took from the
Venusian bard well-nigh all his brilliancy and charm, and
1 Then farewell, Horace, -whom I hated so,
Not for thy faults, but mine, etc.
Childe Harold, canto iii. , stanza 67.
SIR THEODORE MARTIN 269
blurred the sweetness and stately grace of his great compeer
Virgil. And this for young men who already knew and
loved Milton, Dryden, Gray, Goldsmith, Burns, and Scott,
who were beginning to appreciate Wordsworth, and to drink
instruction to mind and heart from that perennial well-head
of beauty and wisdom, and humour and humanity, which is
to be found in Shakespeare, young men who, if rightly
taught, might have enjoyed their Horace, their Virgil, or
their Catullus, with a relish as keen as they felt for their
English favourites, nay, with possibly even a keener relish,
by reason of the pleasant extra effort which it costs to
master them, and which fixes attention upon the subtler
shades of suggestion or of beautiful diction, which young
readers, ever impetuous and eager, are apt to overlook in
their native writers.
Passing from the High School to the University, with
any love for the classics which I had ever felt almost crushed
out of me, I must ever remember with gratitude the new
life and interest infused into them for us by the spirit of
the then Professor of Humanity there Professor Pillans.
What had seemed harsh, crabbed, colourless, grew full of
fascination and charm, and " a perpetual feast of nectared
sweets, where no crude surfeit reigned." He taught us to
read and to assimilate the thoughts, of which the words had
heretofore often seemed but sapless husks. He connected
the literature of Pome with its history ; he made us under-
stand something of the men to whom it was addressed, and
of the state of society in which it was produced. Thus he
made it a living thing for us. He taught us to think of
men who for us had hitherto been little better than names
as human beings, much like the men who had made and
were making our own history, and encouraged us to try to
gather from their stories incentives to work as they had
done
Certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate,
and lessons to guide us in the formation of opinion as to
what is the foundation of a nation's greatness, and by what
270 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
the greatness of a nation, once achieved, is alone to be
maintained. Under such guidance, gentlemen, you may
conceive with what eager delight we took to our Cicero, our
Livy, and our Tacitus ; how it became a positive pleasure to
combat the difficulties that stood in our way, as we strove
to gain full insight into their meaning, and how deep a hold
the great maxims of practical wisdom, which we learned
from them, established upon our minds and in our memories !
With what different eyes, too, did we look upon our
Lucretius, our Ovid, our Virgil, our Horace ! We read
them with a new light upon the page, and learned to love
them with a love which has outlived the lapse of years, and
been proof against the blandishments of newer claimants for
our regard.
Why do I recall these experiences of my own ? I do
so, because they seem to me to contain a lesson of wide
application. I do not know whether the system under which
my compeers and myself suffered has been changed. I hope
it has been reformed, and that not indifferently only, but
altogether ; for, as it was then, so it must always be, a
heavy drag upon the nascent intelligence of a large section
of the community. If boys or young men are to be taught,
you must make sure of their feeling an interest in what
they have to learn. Do that, and the idlest will not turn
away from his studies, nor the dullest lose heart over them.
Let them see the use of what they are learning ; make their
understanding work upon it ; waken their powers of observa-
tion and deduction ; rouse within them the feelings and the
thoughts of which words are but the symbols ; feed them, in
short, with facts which they can appreciate, and not with
phantasmal phrases, and I care not what you set before
them be it grammar, or history, or geography, or classics, or
mathematics, or natural science, or the great leading prin-
ciples of health, morality, or economy and you will have
little cause to complain of the numbers of dull boys or un-
satisfactory men. Follow the opposite course, cram them,
according to their various powers of absorption, with facts
they neither understand nor care for, with dates and names
SIR THEODORE MARTIN 271
which they have not been taught to connect with subjects
of human interest ; load their memories with problems which
they have been schooled into working out mechanically, and
with cut-and-dry opinions, which can be produced to meet
the exigencies of a pass examination -and you may turn out
a fair number of clever fellows, to make a figure in class lists,
but in those lists, I fear, very few of the men will be found
who make their mark in life by bringing into it the well-
digested knowledge, the ready helpful intelligence, and the
strength of character, which are the things most wanted in
every sphere, and which, in the main, are tolerably certain
of recognition and wordly success.
I am not going to weary you with any remarks upon
the vexed question, whether a classical or so-called scientific
education is the best. Like many other controversies of
comparison, it seems to me to be rather a futile one, believ-
ing, as I do, that it is quite possible to combine both, and
that in all the higher education both ought to be combined,
leaving the student to give the preponderance of his time
and attention to that which he finds most congenial to his
gifts and tastes, or most likely to prove of value for the
work he has to do in life. No one will admit more frankly
than myself that the educational studies of our schools and
universities, as formerly pursued, were both too narrow and
too uniform. They omitted instruction in many things
which it was not only useful but necessary for every
educated man to know, and they did not sufficiently take
into account the diversities in the social position, and in the
quality and bias of mind, of the students. All this is now
in the fair way to be corrected. With the facilities every-
where offered, it will be a man's own fault if he finds him-
self, as many of the men who won distinction in the then
only favoured studies used to find themselves, launched into
active life in ignorance of the elements of physical science,
of the phenomena of the material world, and of the laws and
forces by which it is animated or controlled. The regret of
such men at their own deficiencies was deepened by the
thought, how easy it would have been to have acquired, by
272 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
a little extra effort, all this knowledge side by side with
their other pursuits, and how difficult it was to repair the
defect, when the mind was either no longer so plastic or so
receptive as in youth, or when the studies and active duties
of a business or profession left them little or no opportunity
for the task. So, too, in the wide range of academic studies,
there is now scope for every variety of gift and inclination,
and there is no longer an excuse for the deadening of
enthusiasm, often degenerating into habits of idleness, which
was begotten by distaste for studies for which the student
had no natural aptitude.
But whatever a man's special gifts may be, or whatever
his future profession or pursuits in life, it seems to me that
he cannot but be a gainer by the training which is to be
had under a good system of classical study. Of course all
studies are good by which the mind learns to think, to
observe with precision, to seek out principles, to methodise
facts, to draw reasonable conclusions from them, and to be
able to find apt words for whatever it wants to express.
But I know of no way in which all these ends are more
likely to be arrived at than by a sound training in the
classics. The man who has grappled successfully with the
great Greek and Koman writers may be trusted to have
developed a faculty which will stand him in excellent
stead, whatever he may be called upon to do, or wherever
he may be called upon to go. What he knows he will
know thoroughly, and he will have acquired a habit of
application and intellectual discernment, which will enable
him to acquire and digest other knowledge with a rapidity,
and to turn it to account with an address, that must give
him an incalculable advantage over other men, who may be
full of general information or practical knowledge, but who
have not undergone the discipline of difficulty, of reasoning,
and reflection involved in a mastery of the great classical
writers.
The young man who can put into terse well -chosen
English all the meaning of any passage of Thucydides or
Tacitus, or who can make a good precis of an oration of
SIR THEODORE MARTIN 273
Demosthenes or Cicero, will go into active life well prepared
to follow any intellectual pursuit. As a doctor, a lawyer, a
clergyman, as an engineer, an artist, a merchant or a manu-
facturer, he will find the benefit of the knowledge and
aptitude which went to these achievements. They will make
all the special studies of his vocation easier. At the same
time, he will be better able to fulfil the duties of a good
citizen, by bringing to the consideration of all social and
political questions a judgment, less likely to be captivated by
plausible fallacies or fervid rhetoric, for he will know why
states and empires, which bear the closest analogy to our own,
have risen and fallen. He will know, too, what the manly
and sagacious thinkers of antiquity have thought upon such
questions, and be able to call the experience of the past ages
and states of society to his aid in judging of what is necessary
or expedient for the present.
And who will say that such knowledge is not specially
needed at the present time? These are days in which, it
seems to me, every man who can is bound to think of these
things, and to be at pains to seek light from whatever quarter
he can in forming his political opinions. And where will
he find more instruction, whether to warn or to guide, than
in the history of Greece and Eome, and in the recorded con-
clusions of the leading minds of those countries as to what
makes the welfare and prosperity, and secures the stability
of a state. We have chosen whether wisely, or not, time
will show to set aside the principle which, among all civil-
ised states of which we have an authentic record, has been
accepted as the only sound one. Cicero expressed it in ten
words. " Semper in republica tenendum est, ne plurimum
valeant plurimi 1 (Be Bepublica, ii. 22). And Why?
Because wisdom and constancy have never yet in the world's
history been the characteristics of the " plurimi." Is there
anything, in the state of our modern society, to make us be-
lieve that this is less the case now, than it has ever been ?
Look at any of our great cities, in which population
1 "There is one rule that must ever be observed in a state, the preponder-
ance of power must not be in the multitude."
18
274 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
multiplies with a startling rapidity, without a corresponding
increase in the means of comfort, or even of bare subsistence.
Is the proportion of the suffering, the discontented, the needy,
the improvident, the unscrupulous, which will always be
found in old communities, less than it has ever been ? Is
the bitterness of those " who have not " against those " who
have " likely to be less rancorous, where the extremes of
wealth and poverty, of luxurious idleness and ill-paid toil,
of profuse extravagance and " looped and windowed ragged-
ness," are brought into such sharp contrast ? Is the disposi-
tion to think that " whatever is, is wrong " likely to be less
widely spread, when the numbers who have nothing to lose
by change are so great ? Still it is in the hands of the
" plurimi " that we have deliberately chosen to place the
preponderance of power ; and, being there, to recall or to
restrict it is impossible. We must therefore make the best
of the altered state of things, trusting to the average good
sense, and to the patriotism of the mass of the body politic,
not to use that power without deliberation, or a due regard
for the teachings of history and experience.
But the experiment we are making is a momentous one ;
and it is incumbent upon the educated youth of the country
to show by their example that they are alive to the fact. If
British liberty shall ever be in danger, the danger will come
not from above, but from below. The old party distinctions
have lost wellnigh all their meaning. Be in no haste, I
would say to you, if I might, to make up your views on great
political questions. None are more intricate. The interests
of the nation are so vast, and so complex ; our relations to
our own colonies and dependencies, as well as to the other
great states of Europe, demand such cautious handling, that
there are in truth no subjects on which it so much behoves
men to ponder well before coming to a conclusion. Think
of the magnitude of the interests involved ; think of the
disastrous consequences of any great mistake in legislation
or in policy ! A colony lost, the stability of property shaken,
the belief disturbed that Britain can hold, by her own strong
arm and her wise administration, all that generations of her
Sffi THEODORE MARTIN 275
sons have won for her ! Let any of these things happen,
and who can say how great, how swift may be her decline ?
These are the great issues on which political questions bear.
How needful, then, that they should be approached with
minds un warped by the bias of party ties, or of party passions.
Even without such bias it will always be hard enough to
keep the judgment clear. Why then should young men
who may fairly hope hereafter, each in his sphere, to assist,
(some, it may be, even to lead), in the formation of public
opinion fetter their judgment, or their independence, by
adopting the catchwords of the hour, or by subjecting them-
selves to the prejudices from which no political party can
be wholly exempt ?
Just as I consider what may be learned in a sound course
of classical study an admirable preparation for approaching
the political questions which agitate modern society ; so too,
I venture to think that to none will such studies, and those
studies of Mental Philosophy with which they are generally
combined, be of more advantage than to those whose lives
are to be devoted to the Natural Sciences. They will have
learned that there is a large number of ultimate facts and
phenomena in man's nature, as real and as significant as any
of the material phenomena of the universe. They will know
how thoroughly most of the problems about Man -the world
he lives in, his place and duties in it, and his future have
been canvassed, and discussed, by the wisest heads of which
the world has left any record. They will therefore approach
their studies with a modest and reverential spirit, and be less
likely to launch into profitless speculations on what can never
be known, and to promulgate those rash deductions from
very limited data, which characterise so many works of
modern scientific philosophy. Were such studies as I have
indicated more general, many weak and mischievous books
would never see the light, and many a tortured heart and
brain would be saved from bewilderment and despair.
Neither, gentlemen, I am sure, will you fail to join with
me in rating highly the advantage of being trained in youth
upon Books, written in languages which, as vehicles of
276 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
expression, have never been surpassed, books which Time's
severe but kindly hand has winnowed for us from the mass
of ephemeral and commonplace work, which was, no doubt,
produced in abundance both at Athens and in Eome. De-
pend upon it, ancient civilisation, like our own, was prolific
in men like the Etruscan Cassius, of whom Horace speaks
in the Tenth Satire of his First Book,
Capsis quern fama est esse librisque
Ambustum nronriis.
Ambustum propriis,
whose poems were so voluminous that, as Mr. Conington
puts it in his admirable translation,
When he died, his kinsfolk simply laid
His works in order, and his pyre was made.
The ancients had a most laudable horror of big books.
They felt how true in regard to books, as well as to other
things, is the proverb : " The half is better than the whole."
Above all, they knew that the man who studies to condense,
acquires in the process the sense of proportion, the art of
separating what is essential from what is accidental ; makes,
in short, that reserve of power to be felt in his work, which
leaves upon the reader's mind a delightful impression of
symmetry and finish. Moreover, the tone of thought in the
best Greek and Eoman writers is essentially noble and manly.
Trained upon such standards, the mind is less likely to be
attracted by what is false or feeble, unwholesome, sickly,
or sentimental, of which there is enough and to spare in
modern literature ; just as, if our early years have been sur-
rounded by specimens of the best art, ancient, or modern,
we insensibly imbibe such a knowledge of pure form, of
elevated expression, of what is essentially true to nature,
that the eye turns' aside with indifference from bad drawing,
vapid sentiment, or meretricious colour.
The main thing after all is, that in youth we " learn to
learn ; " and, having done this, that we then find out for our-
selves what interests us most, and what we are therefore
likely to do best. With that knowledge let us then determine
SIR THEODORE MARTIN 277
to work out what gifts we have with all our might. "Quidquid
vult, valde vult," says Cicero of his friend Brutus. It is this
doing what he has to do with a will, with the determination
that, what he wills that he shall accomplish, which makes
the useful, the influential, the successful man. He is sure,
however his lot may be cast, to find scope for his energy.
An intelligent persistency, which is a very different thing
indeed from a resolute obstinacy, is the quality of all others
a young man should cultivate in himself. Be modest, but
determined ; measure your own powers carefully and even
sternly ; but resolve that whatever gift is in you shall, with
God's help, be fully and strenuously worked out. Aim high,
but take care that your aim is within your compass, and that,
come what may, it is pursued by honourable means. Above
all, cultivate the habit of work. " I consider the capacity
to labour," writes Sir Walter Scott to his friend Adolpfms,
" as part of the happiness I have enjoyed." Part of the
happiness ? Most men who have gone through a life crowded
with demands upon their capacity for labour, will rather say
that it has been their chief enjoyment, nay their chief
blessing, that they have been called upon to exercise that
capacity, and that it has answered to the call. Many such
men have I myself known ; and I wish I could tell you how
much to them has been that delight in recurring to the books
and studies of their youth, which makes them look back with
tender reverence to the school, or Alma Mater, in which their
love for Literature, Philosophy or Science was first developed.
Others I have known, men "gifted with predominating powers,"
which have found vent in pursuits that have crowned them
with wealth, and all the good things which wealth places
within our reach, who have bitterly mourned, either that in
their youth they had no chance of acquiring a knowledge of
books or the arts, or that they had not duly availed themselves
of such opportunities as they had. How poor and maimed
do such men feel their life to be, when they find the strength
or the occasion for active pursuits fail, and they cannot beguile
the weariness of the heavy hours, by availing themselves of
the delights which they see are found by other men in the
278 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
very books which stare at themselves in mute rebuke from
their library shelves !
It is no paradox to say that there is nothing like work,
pursued, of course, with a due regard to the claims of the
body to exercise and care, for maintaining the elasticity
of the mind, and preparing it for what we should all aim
at, the carrying on the spirit of youth, the freshness of
enjoyment, into riper years, and even into old age. Idleness
and frivolity are the cankers of the soul, and bring upon
it premature disgust, decrepitude, and palsy. There is a
sentence of Cicero's on this point, which experience has often
recalled to me as full of truth. " At enim adolescentem, in
quo senile aliquid, seu senem, in quo est aliquid juventutis
probo ; quod qui sequitur, corpore senex esse poterit, animo
nunquam erit." " What I delight to see is a youth with
something of an old man in him, even as I do to see an old
man who has in him something of a youth ; where these
qualities are, a man may become old in body, but never in
mind." In this great world of moral and material wonder,
where there is so much of beauty, of grandeur, of mystery,
of struggle, of noble effort, of pitiful failure, of magnificent
enterprise, of fascinating discovery so much to love, so
much to admire and to revere, so much to help forward, so
much to fight against and to subdue in this world which we
believe to be but the training-ground of our souls for nobler
and higher and less encumbered work hereafter, in this quasi
childhood of our real lives, why should we not try to keep
our souls as open to new impressions in our riper years as