'In the first place,' they would say, 'English Literature is too _easy_ a study. Our youth, at School or University, starts on his native classics with a liability which in any foreign language he has painfully to acquire. The voices that murmured around his cradle, the voice of his nurse, of his governess, of the parson on Sundays; the voices of village boys, stablemen, gamekeepers and farmers--friendly or unfriendly--of callers, acquaintances, of the children he met at Children's Parties; the voices that at the dinner-table poured politics or local gossip into the little pitcher with long ears--all these were English voices speaking in English: and all these were all the while insensibly leading him up the slope from the summit of which he can survey the promised land spread at his feet as a wide park; and he holds the key of the gates, to enter and take possession. Whereas,' the old instructors would continue, 'with the classics of any foreign language we take him at the foot of the steep ascent, spread a table before him (_mensa, mensa, mensam_ ...) and coax or drive him up with variations upon amo, "I love" or [Greek: tupto], "I beat," until he, too, reaches the summit and beholds the landscape: But O, what labour! O Prince, what pain!' Now so much of truth, Gentlemen, as this plea contains was admitted last term by your Senate, in separating the English Tripos, in which a certain linguistic familiarity may be not rashly presumed of the student, from the Foreign Language Triposes, divided into two parts, of which the first will more suspiciously test his capacity to construe the books he professes to have studied. I may return to this and to the alleged _easiness_ of studies in a School of English. Let us proceed just now with the reasoned plea for neglect.