Now the Bishop is a robust, genial, and
sensible man, but he is not a strictly cultured man. He is only
sketchily varnished with culture. He thinks that German literature
is nebulous, and French literature immoral. I don't suppose he ever
reads an English book, except perhaps an ecclesiastical biography;
he would say that he had no time to read a novel; probably he
glances at the Christian Year on Sundays, and peruses a Waverley
novel if he is kept in bed by a cold. Yet he considers himself, and
would be generally considered, a well-educated man. I believe
myself that the reason why we as a nation love good literature so
little is because we are starved at an impressionable age on a diet
of classics; and to persist in regarding the classics as the high-
water mark of the human intellect seems to me to argue a melancholy
want of faith in the progress of the race. However, for the moment
we all believed ourselves to be men of a high culture, soundly
based on the corner-stone of Latin and Greek. Then the Bishop went
on to speak of athletics with a solemn earnestness, and he said,
with deep conviction, that experience had taught him that whatever
was worth doing was worth doing well.
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