In addition to the things that it is useful to know, there are things that it is pleasant to know, and pleasure is a very important by-product of education. It has been too long the fashion to deny, or at least to decry, this species of enjoyment. “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” says Ecclesiastes; and Sir Thomas Browne musically bewails the dark realities with which “the unhappiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainteth us.” But it was probably the things he did, rather than the things he knew, which soured the taste of life in the Hebrew’s mouth; and as for Sir Thomas Browne, no man ever derived a more lasting satisfaction from scholarship. His erudition, like his religion, was pure profit. His temperament saved him from the loudness of controversy. His life was rich within. This mental ease is not so much an essential of education as the reward of education. It makes smooth the reader’s path; it involves the capacity to think, and to take delight in thinking; it is the keynote of subtle and animated talk. It presupposes a somewhat varied list of acquirements; but it has no official catalogue, and no market value. It emphatically does not consist in knowing inventories of things, useful or otherwise; still less in imparting this knowledge to the world. Macaulay, Croker, and Lord Brougham were men who knew things on a somewhat grand scale, and imparted them with impressive accuracy; yet they were the blight rather than the spur of conversation. Even the “more cultivated portion of the ignorant,” to borrow a phrase of Stevenson’s, is hostile to lectures, unless the lecturer has the guarantee of a platform, and his audience sits before him in serried and somnolent rows. The decline and fall of the classics has not been unattended by controversy. No other educational system was ever so valiantly and nobly defended. For no other have so many masterly arguments been marshalled in vain. There was a pride and a splendour in the long years’ study of Greek. It indicated in England that the nation had reached a height which permitted her this costly inutility, this supreme intellectual indulgence. Greek was an adornment to the minds of her men, as jewels were an adornment to the bodies of her women. No practical purpose was involved. Sir Walter Scott put the case with his usual simplicity and directness in a letter to his second son, Charles, who had little aptitude for study: “A knowledge of the classical languages has been fixed upon, not without good reason, as the mark of a well-educated young man; and though people may scramble into distinction without it, it is always with difficulty, just like climbing over a wall instead of giving your ticket at the door.”