Between an accomplished woman in Miss Austen’s day and an educated man in ours, there are many steps to climb; but the impression conveyed by those who now seek to define the essentials of education is that, like Miss Bingley and Mr. Darcy, they ask too much. Also that they are unduly influenced by the nature of the things they themselves chance to know. Hence the delight of agitators in drawing up lists of ascertainable facts, and severely catechizing the public. They forget, or perhaps they never read, the serene words of Addison (an educated man) concerning the thousand and one matters with which he would not burden his mind “for a Vatican.” With every century that rolls over the world there is an incalculable increase of knowledge. It ranges backward and forward, from the latest deciphering of an Assyrian tablet to the latest settling of a Balkan boundary-line; from a disconcerting fossil dug out of its prehistoric mud to a new explosive warranted to destroy a continent. Obviously an educated man, even a very highly educated man, must be content, in the main, with a “modest and wise ignorance.” Intelligence, energy, leisure, opportunity--these things are doled out to him in niggardly fashion; and with his beggar’s equipment he confronts the vastness of time and space, the years the world has run, the forces which have sped her on her way, and the hoarded thinking of humanity. Compared with this huge area of “general information,” how firm and final were the educational limits of a young Athenian in the time of Plato! The things he did not have to know fill our encyclopædias. Copra and celluloid were as remote from his field of vision as were the Reformation and the battle of Gettysburg. But ivory he had, and the memory of Marathon, and the noble pages of Thucydides. That there were Barbarians in the world, he knew as well as we do. Some, like the Ethiops, dwelt so far away that Homer called them “blameless.” Some were so perilously near that the arts of war grew with the arts of peace. For books he had a certain delicate scorn, caught from his master, Plato, who never forgave their lack of reticence, their fashion of telling everything to every reader. But the suave and incisive conversation of other Athenians taught him intellectual lucidity, and the supreme beauty of the spoken word. “Late and laboriously,” says Josephus, “did the Greeks acquire their knowledge of Greek.” That they acquired it to some purpose is evidenced by the fact that the graduate of an American college must have some knowledge of Plato’s thinking, if he is to be called educated. Where else shall he see the human intellect, trained to strength and symmetry like the body of an athlete, exercising its utmost potency and its utmost charm? Where else shall he find a philosophy which has “in all ages ravished the hearts of men”?