It seems to me to be as impossible effectively to study English literature, except in close association with the classics, as it would be to grasp the significance of mediæval or modern institutions without reference to the political creations of Greece and Rome. I should be very sorry to see the study of Greek and Latin writers displaced, or cut off from the study of our own. So writes Mr. John Morley. But the Professor of Anglo-Saxon and his friends, as we have seen, think otherwise, and have, unhappily for the interests of letters and education, persuaded Oxford to think otherwise too. We say advisedly the interests of letters and education. For the precedent of excluding from a School of “Literature,” and that at the chief centre and nursery of liberal culture, the Literatures of Greece and Rome cannot but be detrimental to the vitality and influence of the ancient classics; and, as Froude truly observed, both the national taste and the tone of the national intellect would suffer serious decline, if they lost their authority. The reaction against philological study which has set in during the last ten years has given them a new lease of life. But the spirit of the age is against them; they have rivals in languages far easier to acquire; they are not, and never can be, in touch with the many. Let them become disassociated from our curriculums of Literature, and they will cease to be influential, They will cease to be studied seriously, to be studied even in the original, except by mere scholars.