And love of literature is not shown in such reading as is common. The literary spirit shows itself, as I said, in appreciating beauty of expression, and how far beauty of expression is cared for we may estimate from the fact that few people think of reading anything a second time. The ordinary reader is profoundly indifferent about style, and will not take the trouble to understand ideas. He keeps to periodicals or light fiction, which enables the mind to loll in its easy chair (so to speak) and see pass before it a series of pleasing images. An idea, as Mark Pattison says, “is an excitant, comes from mind and calls forth mind; an image is a sedative;” and most people when they take up a book are seeking a sedative. So literature is after all a very small force in the lives of most men, and perhaps even less in the lives of most women. Why then are the employments of the school-room arranged on the supposition that it is the grand force of all? The reason is, that we have inherited from the Renascence a false notion of the function of literature. § 15. III. I must now point out a fault in the Renascence ideal which is perhaps the most remarkable of all. Those by whom this ideal was set up were entirely possessed by an enthusiasm for literature, and they made the mistake of attributing to literature a share in general culture which literature seems incapable of taking. After this we could little have expected that the new ideal would exclude literature from the schoolroom, and yet so it has actually turned out. As a literary creation contains the conceptions of an individual mind expressed in a permanent form of words, it exists only for those who can understand the words or at least the conceptions. From this it follows that literature for the young must have its expression in the vernacular. The instances are rare indeed in which any one below the age of fifteen or sixteen (perhaps I might put the limit a year or two higher) understands any but the mother tongue. In the mother tongue indeed some forms of literature exercise a great influence over young minds. Ballad literature seems especially to belong to youth, the youth of nations and of individuals. Aristotle educated Alexander with Homer; and we can easily imagine the effect which the _Iliad_ must have had on the young Greeks. Although in the days of Plato instruction was not confined to literature, he gives this account of part of the training in the Athenian schools: “Placing the pupils on benches, the instructors make them read and learn by heart the poems of good poets in which are many moral lessons, many tales and eulogies and lays of the brave men of old; that the boys may imitate them with emulation and strive to become such themselves.” Here we see a very important function attributed to literature in the bringing up of the young; but the literature so used must obviously be in the language of the learners.