A doubt may be raised, meantime, whether literature is the proper channel into which the intellectual energies of the poor should be directed. For the affirmative it may be urged, that the interest in literature is universal, whilst the interest in science is exceedingly limited. On the other hand, it may truly be retorted that the scientific interest may be artificially extended by culture; and that these two great advantages would in that case arise: 1. That the apparatus of means and instruments is much smaller in the one case than the other; 2. That science opens into a progression of growing interest; whereas literature, having no determined order of advance, and offering no regular succession of stages to the student, does not with the same certainty secure a self-maintaining growth of pleasureable excitement. Some remedy, however, will be applied to this last evil, if a regular plan of _study_ should ever be devised for literature, and perhaps that may be found not impossible. But now, coming to the second question, namely, this question, _If any lecture at all, why upon Pope?_ We may see reason to think that Lord Carlisle was in error. To make a choice which is not altogether the best, will not of necessity argue an error; because much must be allowed to constitutional differences of judgment or of sensibility, which may be all equally right as against any philosophic attempts to prove any one of them wrong. And a lecturer who is possibly aware of not having made the choice which was absolutely best, may defend himself upon the ground that accidental advantages of a personal kind, such as previous familiarity with the subject, or preconformity of taste to the characteristic qualities of the author selected, may have qualified him to lecture on that theme with more effect and with more benefit, than upon a theme confessedly higher but less tractable for himself with his own peculiar preparations. Here, however, the case is different. What might be no error _per se_, becomes one if the special circumstances of the situation show it to have rested upon a deep misconception. Given the audience which Lord Carlisle had before him, the audience which he anticipated, and which he proposed to himself as the modulating law for the quality and style of his lecture, that same choice becomes a profound error which, for a different audience, more refined or more miscellaneous, would have been no error at all. I do not fear that I shall offend Lord Carlisle, so upright as he has always shown himself, so manly, and so faithful to his own views of truth, by repeating firmly that such a choice in such a situation argues a deep misconception of the true intellectual agencies by which Pope acts as a power in literature, and of the moral relations to general human sensibilities or _universal_ nature which such agencies involve. My belief is, that, if a prize had been offered for a bad and