And of these pleasures, necessarily, the leading one was that of Learning, in the sense of receiving instruction;--a pleasure totally separate from that of finding out things for yourself,--and an extremely sweet and sacred pleasure, when you know how to seek it, and receive. On which I am the more disposed, and even compelled, here to insist, because your modern ideas of Development imply that you must all turn out what you are to be, and find out what you are to know, for yourselves, by the inevitable operation of your anterior affinities and inner consciences:--whereas the old idea of education was that the baby material of you, however accidentally or inevitably born, was at least to be by external force, and ancestral knowledge, bred; and treated by its Fathers and Tutors as a plastic vase, to be shaped or mannered as _they_ chose, not as _it_ chose, and filled, when its form was well finished and baked, with sweetness of sound doctrine, as with Hybla honey, or Arabian spikenard. Without debating how far these two modes of acquiring knowledge--finding out, and being told--may severally be good, and in perfect instruction combined, I have to point out to you that, broadly, Athens, Rome, and Florence are self-taught, and internally developed; while all the Gothic races, without any exception, but especially those of London and Paris, are afterwards taught by these; and had, therefore, when they chose to accept it, the delight of being instructed, without trouble or doubt, as fast as they could read or imitate; and brought forward to the point where their own northern instincts might wholesomely superimpose or graft some national ideas upon these sound instructions. Read over what I said on this subject in the third of my lectures last year (page 79), and simplify that already brief statement further, by fastening in your mind Carlyle's general symbol of the best attainments of northern religious sculpture,--"three whalecubs combined by boiling," and reflecting that the mental history of all northern European art is the modification of that graceful type, under the orders of the Athena of Homer and Phidias. And this being quite indisputably the broad fact of the matter, I greatly marvel that your historians never, so far as I have read, think of proposing to you the question--what you might have made of yourselves _without_ the help of Homer and Phidias: what sort of beings the Saxon and the Celt, the Frank and the Dane, might have been by this time, untouched by the spear of Pallas, unruled by the rod of Agricola, and sincerely the native growth, pure of root, and ungrafted in fruit of the clay of Isis, rock of Dovrefeldt, and sands of Elbe? Think of it, and think chiefly what form the ideas, and images, of your natural religion might probably have taken, if no Roman missionary had ever passed the Alps in charity, and no English king in pilgrimage.