follow, but which he knew held within themselves secrets as dear as the art which in his loneliness he pursued. XXXV Artistic Susceptibility--An Apologia--Temperament--Criticism of Life--The Tangle Hugh had found himself one evening in the Combination-room of his college, in a little group of Dons who were discussing with great subtlety and ardour the question of retaining Greek in the entrance examinations of the university. It seemed to Hugh that the arguments employed must be identical with those that might formerly have been used to justify the retention of Hebrew in the curriculum--the advisability of making acquaintance at first hand with a noble literature, the mental discipline to be obtained; "Greek has such a noble grammar!" said one of these enthusiasts. Hugh grew a little nettled at the tone of the discussion. The defenders of Greek seemed to be so impervious to facts which told against them. They erected their theories, like umbrellas, over their heads, and experience pattered harmlessly on the top. Hugh advanced his own case as an instance of the failure, of the melancholy results of a classical curriculum. It was deplorable, he said, that he should have realised, as he did when he left the university, that his real education had then to begin. He had found himself totally ignorant of modern languages and modern history, of science, and indeed of all the ideas with which the modern world was teeming. The chief defender of Greek told him blithely that he was indulging the utilitarian heresy; that the object of his education had been to harden and perfect his mind, so as to make it an instrument capable of subtle appreciation and ardent self-improvement. When Hugh pleaded the case of immense numbers of boys who, after they had been similarly perfected and hardened, had been left, not only ignorant of what they had been supposed to be acquiring, but without the slightest interest in or appreciation of intellectual or artistic ideas at all, he was told that, bad as their case was, it would have been still worse if they had not been subjected to the refining process. Hugh, contrary to his wont, indulged in a somewhat vehement tirade against the neglect of the appreciative and artistic faculties in the case of the victims of a classical education. He maintained that the theory of mental discipline was a false one altogether, and that boys ought to be prepared on the one hand for practical life, and on the other initiated into mental culture. He compared the mental condition of a robust English boy, his sturdy disbelief in intellectual things, with the case of a young Athenian, who was, if we could trust Plato, naturally and spontaneously interested in thoughts and ideas, sensitive to beautiful impressions, delicate, subtle, intelligent, and not less bodily active. He went on to carry the war into the enemy's country, and to attack the theory of mental discipline altogether, which he maintained was the same thing as