life,—they have a fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power, capable of wonderfully helping us to relate the results of modern science to our need for conduct, our need for beauty. Homer’s conceptions of the physical universe were, I imagine, grotesque; but really, under the shock of hearing from modern science that ‘the world is not subordinated to man’s use, and that man is not the cynosure of things terrestrial,’ I could, for my own part, desire no better comfort than Homer’s line which I quoted just now, τλητὸν γὰρ Μοῖραι θυμὸν θέσαν ἀνθρώποισιν— ‘for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of men!’ And the more that men’s minds are cleared, the more that the results of science are frankly accepted, the more that poetry and eloquence come to be received and studied as what in truth they really are,—the criticism of life by gifted men, alive and active with extraordinary power at an unusual number of points;—so much the more will the value of humane letters, and of art also, which is an utterance having a like kind of power with theirs, be felt and acknowledged, and their place in education be secured. Let us therefore, all of us, avoid indeed as much as possible any invidious comparison between the merits of humane letters, as means of education, and the merits of the natural sciences. But when some President of a Section for Mechanical Science insists on making the comparison, and tells us that ‘he who in his training has substituted literature and history for natural science has chosen the less useful alternative,’ let us make answer to him that the student of humane letters only, will, at least, know also the great general conceptions brought in by modern physical science; for science, as Professor Huxley says, forces them upon us all. But the student of the natural sciences only, will, by our very hypothesis, know nothing of humane letters; not to mention that in setting himself to be perpetually accumulating natural knowledge, he sets himself to do what only specialists have in general the gift for doing genially. And so he will probably be unsatisfied, or at any rate incomplete, and even more incomplete than the student of humane letters only. I once mentioned in a school-report, how a young man in one of our English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in _Macbeth_ beginning, ‘Can’st thou not minister to a mind diseased?’ turned this line into, ‘Can you not wait upon the lunatic?’ And I remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every pupil of our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is two thousand one hundred and sixty miles in diameter, and thought at the same time that a good paraphrase for ‘Can’st thou not minister to a mind diseased?’