sponsible for the consequences. The pastor, with grief and indignation, at length told them that it was more than he could bear. Much as he loved them, grateful as he felt for their kindness, he must leave them. Preach to the poor somewhere he must and would, if he had to go into the streets to do it. And they let him go into the street. They found a successor who was not "hypochondriac." All honor to the man! But what of the church as a spiritual power in the world? How soon would such churches, though as the stars of heaven in multitude, be successful in the conversion of the world? Indeed, how much better would the world be than it is now, if it were converted to the type of Christianity which such churches represent? Give me rather the philosophy of Socrates and Plato, and the faith of Cicero, than such a Christianity.

15. THE theoretical consideration of the study of men as a means of rhetorical discipline invites us to observe further, in concluding the discussion, that the study of living men as a source of discipline is commended by the general practice of leading minds in history. The remarks I have to make on this point will not add much to your note-books. Yet they are necessary to illustrate the reality of the views I have presented, as proved by experience.

The truth is, that the majority of us have passed through our courses of collegiate training, under erroneous impressions, probably, of the proportion in which books have contributed to the making of controlling minds in real life. The cases have been exceptional in which power of control has been gained largely in any department of life without this practice of the study of men as distinct from the study of libraries.

(1) Much is signified to the purpose here by the ancient curriculum of education. The ancient systems of education included provision for extensive travel. The Greek and Roman schools of learning were never considered adequate to the complete training of men for public life. The training of the schools, it was

assumed, was to be followed by travel in other lands. No man would then have regarded his literary culture as finished, even in its foundations, without the appendix of travel to the scholastic discipline.

This was the ideal of a liberal education throughout the middle ages. It has always been the English ideal, to this day, of the most perfect educational training. The idea of deriving the whole of a young man's mental discipline from schools of learning is a modern, and specially an American idea. Here it has arisen from the extension of scholastic privileges to multitudes who have not the means of travel, and also from the fact that the early entrance of young men upon public life here in part takes the place of travel in pressing them into some knowledge of the world.

Plato was thirty years old when Socrates died. He spent eight or nine years under the instruction of Socrates, and then he spent ten years in Megara, Magna Grecia, and Sicily, before he returned, and entered upon his public life in Athens. In this country, six of the corresponding ten years in a young man's life are spent in the first experiments of professional duty. Practically those six years are a part of his professional discipline. We all find it such in fact. We depend on the first years of our public life for that part of our training which the early systems of education derived from travel.B ut, come from what source it may, it comes from some source in nearly all the cases in which a power of control is gained largely in any department of public life.

(2) Not to rest with general assertion on a point of so much interest as this, let me recall to you certain biographical facts in the history of literature, and of

LECT. VI.]

SHAKSPEARE.

85

government, and of the arts. These embrace specially, among others, some which relate to the habits of distinguished speakers.

But first let me recall the one man who illustrates almost every thing in literary history. The point in the history of the English drama which Shakspeare marks most vividly is that in which it ceased to be scholastic, and became popular. Shakspeare disowned the tyranny of literature, and defied the tyranny of criticism. He became what he was to the English drama simply by being what he was to the English people. Critics have tried hard to make out for him a large acquaintance with books; but that is the very thing of which the evidence is least in his history.

On the other hand, nothing else is so certain in the meager knowledge we have of his personal career, as that he acted his own plays, lived in the world which he sought to entertain, studied the tastes of his own companions, and wrote for the people of his own times. Never was man more intensely a man of the present. From the latest researches in Shakspearean literature, it appears that he seldom or never wrote a tragedy till some one else had first tried the public taste on the same subject. M. Guizot, who, though a Frenchman, has written the keenest criticism upon Shakspeare's works which I have met with, finds nothing else in them so characteristic, and so philosophically explanatory of their success, as the fact that they evince a most masterly knowledge of his own age and country, and that he wrote in a spirit of ardent loyalty to them both.

The next illustration is Raphael. Says one of the most intelligent critics of this prince of painters, "His

paintings seem as if he had gone about the streets, and, whenever he found an expressive face or attitude, had daguerreotyped it on his brain, and gone back to his studio to reproduce it." The point of interest in the criticism is the fact that such was precisely the fact in Raphael's professional habits. His most celebrated faces are almost all of them portraits. His personal friends, the celebrated women of his age, some of the courtesans of Rome and Florence, still live on his canvas. Such was the extent to which he carried this fidelity to real life, that some critics even question his originality of conception.

an

A third example is Edmund Burke. One of his critics, speaking of Burke's writing, says of the man, "He was a man who read every thing, and saw every thing." The key to his success as an author author, I say, for he was no speaker-is to be found in his own criticism of Homer and Shakspeare, of whom he said, "Their practical superiority over all other men arose from their practical knowledge of all other men.” Burke respected the popular mind. In his appeals to it he laid out his whole strength. Some of his most profound reflections on political economy he embodied in his "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol." And what was the "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol"? Nothing but a political pamphlet written to carry on a political campaign in a single shire. His "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful" was the product of a period of recreation. The hard work of his life was expended on the practical affairs of England. He was one of the most ardent and original of theorists; yet such was his subjection of theory to fact in his knowledge of mankind, that his was the first leading mind in Europe which