The radical fault of those who regulate education in our Universities and elsewhere, and prescribe our schoolbooks, is their deplorable want of judgment. They seem to be utterly incapable of distinguishing between what is proper for pure specialists and what is proper for ordinary students. There is not a page in this edition which does not proclaim aloud, that it could never have been intended for the purposes to which it has been applied, that it is the work of technical scholars, concerned only in textual and philological criticism and exegesis, and appealing only to those who approach the study of Shakespeare in the same spirit and from the same point of view. Anything more sickening and depressing, anything more calculated to make the name of Shakespeare an abomination to the youth of England it would be impossible for man to devise. It is shameful to prescribe such books for study in our Schools and Educational Institutes. OUR LITERARY GUIDES I. A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE[11] [Footnote 11: _A Short History of English Literature._ By George Saintsbury, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh.] This Short History is evidently designed for the use of serious readers, for the ordinary reader who will naturally look to it for general instruction and guidance in the study of English Literature, and to whom it will serve as a book of reference; for students in schools and colleges, to many of whom it will, in all likelihood, be prescribed as a textbook; for teachers engaged in lecturing and in preparing pupils for examination. Of all these readers there will not be one in a hundred who will not be obliged to take its statements on trust, to assume that its facts are correct, that its generalizations are sound, that its criticisms and critical theories are at any rate not absurd. It need hardly be said that, under these circumstances, a writer who had any pretension to conscientiousness would do his utmost to avoid all such errors as ordinary diligence could easily prevent, that he would guard scrupulously against random assertions and reckless misstatements, that he would, in other words, spare no pains to deserve the confidence placed in him by those who are not qualified to check his statements or question his dogmas, and who naturally suppose that the post which he occupies is a sufficient guarantee of the soundness and accuracy of his work. But so far from Professor Saintsbury having any sense of what is due to his position and to his readers, he has imported into his work the worst characteristics of irresponsible journalism: generalizations, the sole supports of which are audacious assertions, and an indifference to exactness and accuracy, as well with respect to important matters as in trifles, so scandalous as to be almost incredible.