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But to return. Should we not rather in education follow that method which Providence has already mapped out for us? If we are bound, as of course we are, to teach our pupils to breathe freely on the highest mountain-peaks of Shakespeare’s art, how can we more certainly train them to do so, than by leading them along the same upward path by which Shakespeare himself rose–through the various changes of taste, the gradual developments of literature, through which the English mind had been passing before Shakespeare’s time? For there was a literature before Shakespeare. Had there not been, neither would there have been a Shakespeare. Critics are now beginning to see that the old fancy which made Shakespeare spring up at once, a self-perfected poet, like Minerva full-armed from the head of Jove, was a superstition of pedants, who neither knew the ages before the great poet, nor the man himself, except that little of him which seemed to square with their shallow mechanical taste. The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries, and tragi-comic attempts–these were the roots of his poetic tree–they must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to appreciate him. These fed Shakespeare’s youth; why should they not feed our children’s? Why indeed? That inborn delight of the young in all that is marvellous and fantastic–has that a merely evil root? No surely! It is a most pure part of their spiritual nature; a part of “the heaven which lies about us in our infancy;” angel-wings with which the free child leaps the prison-walls of sense and custom, and the drudgery of earthly life–like the wild dreams of childhood, it is a God-appointed means for keeping alive what noble Wordsworth calls

those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised;

by which

Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither:
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sporting on the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

And those old dreams of our ancestors in the childhood of England, they are fantastic enough, no doubt, and unreal, but yet they are most true and most practical, if we but use them as parables and symbols of human feeling and everlasting truth. What, after all, is any event of earth, palpable as it may seem, but, like them, a shadow and a ghostly dream, till it has touched our hearts, till we have found out and obeyed its spiritual lesson? Be sure that one really pure legend or ballad may bring God’s truth and heaven’s beauty more directly home to the young spirit than whole volumes of dry abstract didactic morality. Outward things, beauty, action, nature, are the great problems for the young. God has put them in a visible world, that by what they see they may learn to know the unseen; and we must begin to feed their minds with that literature which deals most with visible things, with passion manifested in action, which we shall find in the early writing of our Middle Ages; for then the collective mind of our nation was passing through its natural stages of childhood and budding youth, as every nation and every single individual must at some time or other do; a true “young England,” always significant and precious to the young. I said there was a literary art before Shakespeare–an art more simple, more childlike, more girlish as it were, and therefore all the more adapted for young minds. But also an art most vigorous and pure in point of style: thoroughly fitted to give its readers the first elements of taste, which must lie at the root of even the most complex aesthetics. I know no higher specimens of poetic style, considering the subject, and the belief of the time about them, than may be found in many of our old ballads. How many poets are there in England now, who could have written “The Twa Bairns,” or “Sir Patrick Spens?” How many such histories as old William of Malmesbury, in spite of all his foolish monk miracles? As few now as there were then; and as for lying legends–they had their superstitions, and we have ours; and the next generation will stare at our strange doings as much as we stare at our forefathers. For our forefathers they were; we owe them filial reverence, thoughtful attention, and more–we must know them ere we can know ourselves. The only key to the present is the past.