This courage of the past--this self-confidence of the past by which it was enabled to broaden the scope of its life and pass on to us a social and imaginative heritage by which every situation and relationship of our lives is rendered more beautiful--was not the result of accident. It was the result of long and untiring efforts in self-cultivation, and the records of these efforts are to be found in the great literatures which not only recorded, but inspired and motivated them. In those times the staple of education was the study of literature; and, for my present purposes, the important features of this study were, that it was thorough and exact, that it neglected no labour which might aid in the central purpose, and that, in requiring a certain common background in all students, it was eminently a social and even international thing. To attain the same degree of courage and self-confidence, it would be necessary to us to make the same effort of self-cultivation. The quality of contemporary literature suggests that we are not exerting that effort; manners and excesses and failures in contemporary life equally suggest that we are not. And if we examine the habitual methods of contemporary teachers of literature, we find so many differences between these methods and those of the past that it is plain that our educators have all but lost sight of their central objects. As early as 1882, in _Literature and Science_, Matthew Arnold set forth a rather singular prophecy, describing with great exactness much of our present situation. “As with Greek,” he said, “so with letters generally: they will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more rationally, but they will not lose their place. What will happen will rather be that there will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too many; there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency; but letters will not in the end lose their leading place.”