Mr. Gladstone used to say that, in his schooldays at Eton, it was possible to learn much or to learn nothing, but it was not possible to learn superficially. And one saw the same in afterlife. What people professed to know they knew. The affectation of culture was despised; and ignorance, where it existed, was honestly confessed. For example, every one knew Italian, but no one pretended to know German. I remember men who had never been to a University but had passed straight from a Public School to a Cavalry Regiment or the House of Commons, and who yet could quote Horace as easily as the present generation quotes Kipling. These people inherited the traditions of Mrs. Montagu, who "vindicated the genius of Shakespeare against the calumnies of Voltaire," and they knew the greatest poet of all time with an absolute ease and familiarity. They did not trouble themselves about various readings and corrupt texts and difficult passages. They had nothing in common with that true father of all Shakespearean criticism, Mr. Curdle in "Nicholas Nickleby," who had written a treatise on the question whether Juliet's nurse's husband was really "a merry man" or whether it was merely his widow's affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. But they knew the whole mass of the plays with a wide and generous intimacy; their speech was saturated with the immortal diction, and Hamlet's speculations were their nearest approach to metaphysics. Broadly speaking, all educated people knew the English poets down to the end of the eighteenth century. Byron and Moore were enjoyed with a sort of furtive and fearful pleasure; and Wordsworth was tolerated. Every one knew Scott's novels by heart, and had his or her favourite heroine and hero. Then, again, all educated people knew history in a broad and comprehensive way. They did not concern themselves about ethnological theories, influences of race and climate and geography, streams of tendency, and the operation of unseen laws; but they knew all about the great people and the great events of time. They were conversant with all that was concrete and ascertainable; and they took sides as eagerly and as definitely in the strifes of Yorkist and Lancastrian, Protestant and Papist, Roundhead and Cavalier, as in the controversies over the Reform Bill or the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Then, again, all educated people knew the laws of architecture and of painting; and, though it must be confessed that in these respects their views were not very original, still they were founded on first-hand knowledge of famous models, and, though conventional, were never ignorant. But it will be said that all this represents no very overwhelming mass of culture, and that, if these were all the accomplishments which the last generation had to boast of, their successors have no reason to dread comparison.