I remember once hearing a veteran and successful educator say that he considered a well-educated man was a man whose mind was not at the mercy of the last new book on any ordinary subject. If that is an infallible test, then our public schools may be said to have succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation. The ordinary public-school type of man is not in the least at the mercy of the last new book, because he is careful never to submit himself to the chance of pernicious bias—he does not get so far as to read it. [Sidenote: EDUCATIONAL AIMS] At present athletics are so much deferred to, that boys seem to me to be encouraged deliberately to lay their plans as if life ended at thirty. But I believe that schools should aim at producing a type that should develop naturally and equably with the years. What we want to produce is an unselfish, tranquil, contented type, full of generous visions; neither prematurely serious nor incurably frivolous, nor afraid of responsibility, nor morbidly desirous of influence; neither shunning nor courting publicity, but natural, wholesome, truthful, and happy; not afraid of difficulties nor sadly oppressed with a sense of responsibility; fond of activity and yet capable of using and enjoying leisure; not narrow-minded, not viewing everything from the standpoint of a particular town or parish, but patriotic and yet not insular, modern-spirited and yet not despising the past, practical and yet with a sense of spiritual realities. I think that what is saddest is that the theoretical perfection screens the practical inutility of the thing. If it seems good to the collective wisdom of the country to let education go, and to make a public-school a kind of healthy barrack-life for the physical training of the body, with a certain amount of mental occupation to fill the vacant hours that might otherwise be mischievous—pleasure with a hem of duty—let it be frankly admitted that it is so; but that the education received by boys at our public-schools is now, except in intention, literary—that is the position which I entirely deny. Personally I had a certain feeble taste for literature. I read in a slipshod way a good deal of English poetry, memoirs, literary history, and essays, but my reading was utterly amateurish and unguided. I even had some slight preferences in style, but I could not have given a reason for my preference; I could not write an English essay—I had no idea of arrangement. I had never been told to “let the bones show;” I had no sense of proportion, and considered that anything which I happened to have in my own mind was relevant to any subject about which I was writing. I had never learnt to see the point or to insist upon the essential. [Sidenote: THE CLASSICS]