PREFACE
cuvacy, which are the two things in whick all mankind are
more deficient than in any other mental quality whatever.
The whole of my life has been spent in trying to give my
proper attention to things and to be accurate, and I have
not succeeded as well as I could wish ; and other people, 1
am afraid, are not muck more fortunate, You cannot begin
this habit too early, and I consider theve is nothing of so
great a value as the habit of drawing, to secure those two
desirable ends.
Then we come to the subject-matter, whether scientific or
@sthetic, of education, and I should naturally have no
question at all about teaching the elements of Physical
science of the kind I have sketched, in a practical manner ;
but among scientific topics, using the word scientific in the
broadest sense, I would also include the elements of the
theory of morals and of that of political and social life,
which, strangely enough, it never seems to occur to anybody
to teach a child. I would have the history of our own
country, and of all the influences which have been brought
to bear upon it, with incidental geography, not as a meve
chronicle of reigns and battles, but as a chapter in the development
 of the race and the history of civilization.
Then with respect to wsthetic knowledge and discipline,
we have happily in the English language one of the most
magnificent storehouses of artistic beauty and of models of
literary excellence which exists in the world at the present
time. I have said before, and I repeat it here, that if a
man cannot get literary culture of the highest kind out of
his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and
Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of
our illustrious writers—I say, if he cannot Let it out of
those writers, he cannot get it out of anything ; and I
would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time of
cvery English child to the careful study of models of
English writing of such varied and wonderful kind as
we possess, and, what is still move important and still

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