It cannot be too strongly urged that the purpose of a worker in Middle English should be nothing less than to read sensitively, with the fullest possible understanding. Of such a purpose many _curricula_ give no hint. Nor could it be deduced readily from the latest activities of research, where the tendency is more and more to leave the main road (which should be crowded if the study is to thrive) for side-tracks and by-paths of side-tracks in which the sense of direction and proportion is easily lost. That much may be accomplished by specialists following a single line of approach has been demonstrated by the philologists, who have burrowed tirelessly to present new materials to a world which seldom rewards their happiest elucidations with so much as a 'Well said, old mole!' The student of literature (in the narrower modern sense of the word) brings a new range of interests. He will be disappointed if he expects to find a finished art, poised and sustained, in an age singularly afflicted with growing pains; but there are compensations for any one who is content to catch glimpses of promise, and—looking back and forward, and aside to France—to take pleasure in tracing the rise and development of literary forms and subjects. It is still not enough. The specialist in language as a science, or in literature as an art, may find the Sixth Passus of _Piers Plowman_ (VIII _a_) or the Wiclifite sermon (XI _b_) of secondary interest. Yet both are primary documents, the one for the history of society, the other for the history of religion. There is no escape from a counsel of perfection:—whoever enters on a course of mediaeval studies must reckon as a defect his lack of interest in any side of the life of the Middle Ages; and must be deaf to those who, like the fox in Aesop that had lost its tail, proclaim the benefits of truncation. The range of knowledge and experience was then more than in later times within the compass of a single mind and life. And so much that is necessary to a full understanding has been lost that no possible source of information should be shut out willingly. It is an exercise in humility to call up in all its details some scene of early English life (better a domestic scene than one of pageantry) and note how much is blurred. Every blur is a challenge. There are few familiar subjects in which a beginner can sooner reach the limits of recorded knowledge. The great scholars have found time to chart only a fraction of their discoveries; and the greatest could not hope or wish for a day when the number of quests worth the making would be appreciably less. * * * * *