On Some Defects in Public School Education: A Lecture Delivered at the Royal Institution, on Friday, February 8th, 1867. With Notes and Appendices

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Macmillan and Company, 1867 - 67 pages
 

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Page 32 - ... forcing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations which are the acts of ripest judgment and the final work of a head filled by long reading and observing with elegant maxims and copious invention. These are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings like blood out of the nose or the plucking of untimely fruit...
Page 26 - Would not a Chinese, who took notice of this way of breeding, be apt to imagine that all our young gentlemen were designed to be teachers and professors of the dead languages of foreign countries, and not to be men of business in their own?
Page 51 - I shall detain you now no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but straight conduct you to a hill-side, where I will point you out the right path of a virtuous and noble education ; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect, and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming.
Page 51 - How charming is divine philosophy ! Not harsh, and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns.
Page 26 - First, we do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek, as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.
Page 56 - It seems to me that Pygmalion's frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity : for words are but the images of matter, and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.
Page 14 - T was his to struggle with that perilous age ... Which claims for manhood's vice the privilege Of boyhood ; — when young Dionysus seems All glorious as he burst upon the East A jocund and a welcome conqueror ; And Aphrodite, sweet as from the sea She rose and floated in her pearly shell, A laughing girl...
Page 43 - Ah, yes: you allude to my father. My father was a great man; but I am more and more forgetting his greatness: that kind of greatness is what a woman can never truly enter into. I am less and less his daughter every day that goes by.
Page 45 - By your beauty, which confesses Some chief Beauty conquering you — By our grand heroic guesses Through your falsehood at the True, — We will weep not ! earth shall roll Heir to each god's aureole — And Pan is dead. Earth outgrows the mythic fancies Sung beside her in her youth, And those debonair romances Sound but dull beside the truth. Phoebus' chariot-course is run : Look up, poets, to the sun ! Pan, Pan is dead.
Page 16 - Mated with a squalid savage — what to me were sun or clime! I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time...

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