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the recent appointment of my accomplished friend, Mr. Arthur Richmond Marsh, as professor of Comparative Literature.
No study seems to me to hold less place in our universities, as a rule, than that of literature viewed in any respect as an art; all tends to the treatment of it as a department of philology on the one side, or of history on the other; and even where it is studied, and training is really given in it, it is almost always a training that begins and ends with English tradition and method.
It may call itself ‘Rhetoric and English Composition,’ but the one of these subdivisions is as essentially English as the other.
It not only recognizes the English language as the vehicle to be used,—which is inevitable, —but it does not go behind the English for its methods, standards, or illustrations.
That there is such a thing as training in thought and literary expression, quite apart from all national limitations—this may be recognized here and there in the practice of our colleges, but very rarely in their framework and avowed method.
And, strange to say, this deficiency, if it be one, has only been increased by the increased
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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