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students at King's College asked to be excused classical lectures that they might give more attention to Mr. Brewer's lectures in English, the classical teacher would send them to Mr. Brewer, well knowing what he would say to such an application. But his main characteristics as a teacher were the same, whatever the subject in hand. The most remarkable of these was his habit of placing himself side by side, as it were, with his pupils, and teaching them as a fellowlearner of superior knowledge and power, rather than as a master with a right to dictate to them. In his classical lectures, for instance, in which the present writer first made his acquaintance, he would go through very little of his author at a time— some ten or twenty lines perhaps of Horace in a lecture; and he would discuss every word with us, eliciting our own knowledge or lack of knowledge respecting it, and, with the dictionary before him, leading us step by step through the process which we ought to have gone through for ourselves. He checked at once those facile off-hand approximations to the meaning of a word or sentence with which beginners are too apt to be content; and thus from the first he made every thoughtful student realise in some measure the depth and complexity of the language of a great writer. He treated words with just the same laborious, patient, and penetrating observation which a man of science bestows upon the simple facts of nature; and in his company we learned one of the first great lessons of study-not merely our own ignorance as individuals, but the compara

tive ignorance even of those who know most. Though he knew so much more than we did, he always spoke and acted as if he were as much a learner as we were. The consequence of this modest thoroughness in his way of teaching was, that a term or two under him in such a subject as classics placed a capable student in a position in which he could study successfully by himself. Instead of merely acquiring a store of opinions and facts, he had got hold of the true method of working, and had been shown how to thread his way through the labyrinth. Mr. Brewer wrote Latin prose with singular elegance, and was a most severe critic of translations both from and into Latin and Greek. But the pupil whose work was being criticised, or rewritten, saw his master's mind at work in all the details of the process, and learned not merely what the result ought to be, but what were the reasons for it, and the means of producing it.

One other source of his influence over his pupils should be mentioned. The instrument he employed to urge and control them was praise and not blame. Many a young man left the lecture-room with better hopes for himself and the future because Mr. Brewer had detected and praised in his work some merit of which he was himself unconscious. The young men,' he would sometimes say, 'see visions; the old men dream dreams.' Perhaps such a discipline ran some risk of giving undue encouragement to youthful vanity. But his vigilant and critical judgment was ever at hand to check this danger; and the more

frequent influence of such training was to induce young men to put forth for adventure in thought and action who would otherwise have stayed with folded hands at home.

Of his method in teaching history two of the essays in this volume will afford the best conception-those on the Study of History in general, and on the Study of English History in particular.' What is most conspicuous in them is the characteristic just noticed in his classical teaching. Instead of giving accounts of historical events or of their bearings on his own authority, he seemed to take his pupils by the hand, leading them to the best points of view from which to survey the historical drama, and then to make them feel that it told its own tale to careful and thoughtful observation. He would begin by fixing their attention on the main facts and outlines of a period or a reign, and would draw out of those leading facts, by a kind of historic induction, the great influences which were at work. He was still the companion of his pupils, pointing out to them, at every turn, not so much what he himself saw, as what they could see themselves if they were patient and thoughtful. In history, moreover, above all other subjects, he made them feel more and more, as he grew older, the vastness and mystery of the course of human life and action. His sense of the immense difficulty of unravelling the threads

'Much may also be learned respecting his method from a very useful book he published, under the title, An Elementary Atlas of History and Geography. The first edition contained a most interesting and characteristic introduction; but this was omitted in subsequent editions.

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of history increased as he learned more of them in his studies at the Rolls Office. Ah,' he said once to a former pupil, when I lectured to you twentyfive years ago, I used to think I knew something about history; but I have found out now I know very little indeed about it.' But he held with unabated confidence to his conviction that the main facts of history and the lessons to be drawn from them are independent of conflicting interpretations of its details; and nothing was more characteristic of his teaching than the clearness with which he brought out these leading facts, and made his pupils feel that they were independent of his own opinion, or of the partial views of any historian. The great outlines of history in his hands assumed forms as clear and distinct as the leading facts of any natural science, and he made it felt that they could be accepted with similar confidence.

His researches, indeed, into the reign of Henry VIII. led him to one conclusion, which seems particularly worth mention, and which affords a very remarkable and instructive illustration of these views of the true method of interpreting history. He had penetrated, as we have said, into all the details of Henry VIII.'s reign with a completeness which had never before been possible; and the result, contrary to his own anticipation, was to confirm the general truth of the view of that reign presented by the two writers who had up to a recent date been the most popular authorities respecting it. The best sketch, he said, of Henry VIII.'s reign anywhere to be found

is afforded by Shakespeare's play; and next in value to this he reckoned the narrative of Hume. Before he had thoroughly investigated the subject for himself, he distrusted Hume, but he was more and more struck by the sagacity with which that historian had penetrated to the true causes of events, and to the true characters of the chief actors of the time. Such a conclusion is not a little consoling to that large class of readers who must always depend on the great classical writers for their knowledge of history.

There was, however, one other subject on which Mr. Brewer was perhaps even more interesting and instructive than as an historian and historical lecturer. That subject was English Literature, which, as has been mentioned, was combined for some time with the other work of his chair at King's College. It offered scope for the exercise of all his capacities-as a scholar, an historian, a philosopher, a theologian, a man of letters, and one who had seen a good deal of the world. There was not a single writer of any consequence with whom he did not feel some native sympathy, and he loved to interpret them all, in their various bearings, in that patient inductive style which characterised him in all his work. Here, again, he adhered to his general method in teaching. He selected the great authors of the successive periods of our history, and their leading works; and concentrated the attention of his pupils upon them. When these were known and understood, the rest, he knew, would fall into their right places and find their level.1

On this plan, at the instance of the Clarendon Press, Oxford, he pro

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