In all things connected with education we are in a world of hollow pretensions. The speeches at prize distributions assume that pupils will make use of their knowledge afterwards. They are told that the wonderful literatures of Greece and Rome now lie open before them like gardens where they have but to wander and cull flowers. If they have studied modern languages they are told that European literature is theirs. The plain truth is, that both in England and France, and especially in France, there is a small studious class isolated in the midst of masses occupied with pleasure or affairs, and so indifferent to intellectual pursuits that the slightest mental labour is enough to deter them. Whatever reading they do is in the direction of least resistance. They have no enterprise, they find all but the easiest reading irksome, and the obstacle of the easiest foreign language insurmountable. They will play cards or dominoes in the day-time rather than take down a classic author from his shelf. A guest in a French château told me that on seeing the ennui that reigned there, whilst nobody read anything, she asked if there were any books in the house, and was shown into a library of classics formed in a previous generation but never opened in this. All testimony that comes to me about French interiors confirms the belief that the number of people who form libraries has greatly diminished. It was once the custom in the upper class, but nobody would say that it is the custom now. In twelve or fifteen country houses known to a friend of mine there was only one library, and, what is more significant, only one man deserving the name of a reader. Even in England, where people read certainly three times as much as they do in France, the expenditure on books bears no proportion to income, except in the case of a few scholars. How many English houses are there, of the wealthy middle class, where you could not find a copy of the representative English authors, and where foreign literatures are unknown! [Sidenote: English knowledge of the Bible.] [Sidenote: Possibility of Future Neglect.] Unknown--with one exception. The belief that Hebrew literature is one book, and that it was written by God himself, and that the English translation of it has a peculiar sanctity, has given the English middle class a familiarity with that literature which is a superiority over the French middle class. The French Catholic laity only knows the Bible through _l’Histoire Sainte_ and selections; the unbelievers take no interest in it. Nothing surprises an Englishman more than French ignorance of the Bible; yet it is probable that if ever the English cease to believe in the dogma of inspiration they will neglect the whole Bible as they neglect the Apocrypha now. [Sidenote: Scientific Education.] [Sidenote: Usefully educated Young Men.] [Sidenote: Sacrifice of the Superfluous.] [Sidenote: Effects of the Loss of Literature.]