Can English literature be made, and should it be made, the subject of teaching and of examination in the Universities? That is really the topic of Mr. Churton Collins's book ‘The Study of English Literature’ (Macmillan). In considering a question of this kind, every person of mature years will be swayed by his own experience. Mine rather turns me against Mr. Collins's enthusiasm for teaching our literature at Oxford and Cambridge. I went to school with, perhaps, rather a wide knowledge of books for a boy, and at school they tried to teach us English literature. We possessed ‘Paradise Lost,’ Cowper's ‘Task,’ and an historical manual of the literature of England; but I do not suppose that I ever prepared one single lesson in these books or ever answered more than one question. Yet, wherein am I the worse, or wherein are the hundred of other contemporary boys who were in the same or similar classes the better? As to one's school experience, then the teaching of English literature was an arid waste of time, although, or because, one was never without a book in one's hand or one's pocket. At college nobody pretended to teach English literature, yet Mr. Collins, at college, knew plenty of it. I am concerned to believe that, had they been part of the curriculum, Mr. Collins might have been less devoted to the poetry and prose of our dear century. The truth is, as Mr. Collins perceives (p. 125, note), that young men who are inclined to be literary ‘have generally preferred, and, in all probability, will continue to prefer, to take their education into their own hands.’ Nothing can be more true: from the rare geniuses, like Shelley, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Gibbon, and so forth, who have been at Oxford, down to the mere literary trifler, all students whose main interest is literature have taken, and will take, the chief of their education into their own hands. There is no need to educate in English literature those ‘who wish and will know everything,’ as the infant Scott defined the virtuoso.