Here is the School, then,--with the classics on trial in the persons
of these new school-men. That is the central group. What more do we
want? Here is the new and the old already. But this is the old
_revived_--newly revived;--this is the revival of learning in whose
stimulus the _new_ is beginning. There is something in the field
besides that. There is a 'school-master abroad' yet, that has not been
examined. These young men who have resolved themselves in their secret
sittings into a committee of the whole, are going to have him up. He
will be obliged to come into this park here, and speak his speech in
the ear of that English 'common sense,' which is meddling here, for
the first time, in a comprehensive manner with things in general; he
will have to 'speak out loud and plain,' that these English parents
who are sitting here in the theatre, some of 'the wiser sort' of them,
at least, may get some hint of what it is that this pedagogue is
beating into their children's brains, taking so much of their glorious
youth from them--that priceless wealth of nature which none can
restore to them,--as the purchase. But this is not all. There is a man
who teaches the grown-up children of the parish in which this Park is
situated, who happens to live hard by,--a man who professes the care
and cure of minds. He, too, has had a summons sent him; there will be
no excuse taken; and his examination will proceed at the same time.
These two will come into the Park together; and perhaps we shall not
be able to detect any very marked difference in their modes of
expressing themselves. They are two ordinary, quiet-looking personages
enough. There is nothing remarkable in their appearance; their coming
here is not forced. There are deer in this Park; and 'book-men' as
they are, they have a taste for sport also it seems. Unless you should
get a glimpse of the type,--of the unit in their faces--and that
shadowy train that _the cipher_ points to,--unless you should observe
that their speech is somewhat strongly pronounced for an individual
representation--merely glancing at them in passing--you would not,
perhaps, suspect who they are. And yet the hints are not wanting; they
are very thickly strewn,--the hints which tell you that in these two
men all the extant learning, which is in places of trust and
authority, is represented; all that is not included in that elegant
learning which those students are making sport of in those 'golden
books' of theirs, under the trees here now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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