“To make us understand what we were reading and enjoy it, to make us wish to read more and understand it better—such was the object of his whole method. There was very little of what is called ‘getting by heart’ in his system, unless when he wished to train memory merely for the sake of training it. When we were studying some Latin author he told us all about the author and the scenes described in the pages before us, and he invited all manner of questions on the subject. He showed us on the maps where the places were which the author was describing, and he illustrated the author’s meaning as if he were an artist illustrating a story. “I do not know to describe his method of teaching better than by saying that it was literary rather than scholastic. His great desire was that a boy should be able to read Greek and Latin as easily as he read Shakespeare and Addison, and he regarded grammar as a necessary means to that end, but not as the end itself. He always took care that historical and geographical knowledge should work in with and illustrate our literary studies. “I can only say for myself that whatever love of books I may have had I owe in the main to his teaching and to his influence, and I can say with literal truthfulness that throughout a busy life in public and in private his influence and teaching have always been with me and are with me still.” John Goulding would not be considered in our day a remarkable pedagogist and has not bequeathed his name to a system of education; yet he presents many traits of the true teacher, and these details of his life are pertinent to our question. The true commentator, whose suggestion we see in the Cork schoolmaster, will not be a philologist, but will use philology; he will not be a grammarian, but he will refuse no point of grammar that will help. He will press every science into service, but he will be the slave of none. He will remember that his supreme object in teaching is not to compose a dictionary of antiquities nor to collect extracts for rhetoric or examples for grammar. His object rather is and should be to bring the pupil to the text, to bring the mind of the author to the mind of the reader. Away from dictionary and grammar, away from footnote and appendix, back to the text, should be the teacher’s cry. The text should be the center upon which every source of information should be focused, not the center from which to radiate to the cheerless circumference of specializations. We do not contend for superficiality, for slipshod grammar, for inaccurate erudition. Thoroughness, care, accuracy, must rule in the classroom. We are simply for liberal education, which opposes early specialization in courses and must equally oppose it in the teaching of literature.