AUSTRALIAN LECTURES.* Da. WOOLLEY undertook a task of no light
or easy nature, in endeavouring to foster a taste for learning in a community wholly intent upon money-making. In the course of his labours it must have happened to him now and then to find reason for casting a regretful look back on the days when, at Oxford, he was surrounded with young men who did not need to be lectured elementarily on the value of learning and the advantage of self-culture. But in a laud whither people have come in the haste to grow rich, and where all objects are subordinated to the enterprise of realizing a fortune, comparatively little attention is likely to be given to the aims which are gladly pursued in a higher state of civilization. A fellow of one of our Universities, acting in a remote colony as a lecturer at mechanics' institutes and colleges still in the throes of immaturity, is not in the most enviable of positions. There is much in the work which may well inspire a good man with enthusiasm, but it is scarcely possible that he can abstain in the desert from sometimes thinking wistfully of the land of Goshen he has left behind him. It is evident that the dis- couragements which Dr. Woolley had to encounter in his work— not the heaviness of the work itself—sometimes told upon his spirits. Once or twice be was obliged to warn his hearers that they were sliding back, and to take a somewhat gloomy review of past failures, in order to stimulate their flagging energies. He had to fight, as he observes, against "the materializing tendency of a new and unformed society," and to put in operation a kind of intellectual coercion to keep the seekers after learning from drift- ing away into the great stream of mammon-worshippers. But to mark carefully the rough stages of the road is a safeguard against breaking down at them unawares. Dr. Woolley at least entered upon his work with a just appreciation of its difficul- ties.
We might describe these lectures in a few words as being distinguished by large and generous views, by a spirit of most sincere tolerance, and by singular felicity of diction, rising frequently into pure eloquence. They are always free from theheavy, dictatorial, "tyrannical" tone adopted by some lecturers, and nearly always from the equally painful fault of mawkish- ness and sentimentality. It is only when Dr. Woolley talks of women that he disturbs our gravity, and oversets an honest desire to consider his sayings. Had we chanced to stumble upon his Elizabethan panegyrics of the fair sex when we first looked into the volume, we might have concluded that Dr. Woolley was an exceedingly amiable man, but that it was not desirable to read his lectures. Women are, or were, till within the last year or two, rather scarce in Australia, and this fact, by lessening Dr. Woolley's opportunities of observation and study, may have in some degree perverted his judgment. That which is rare has sometimes an exaggerated and partly fictitious value placed upon it. A year or two at home would probably restore to %Dr.
• Lectures Delivered in Awiralia. By John Woolley, D.C.L Principal and Profes- sor of Logic and Classics in the University of Sydney, late Fellow of University College, Oxford. Macmillan. 1863. Woolley's mind the calm impartial tone which is so necessary in considering questions on which some difference of opinion is allowed to exist. But a professor in a strange land may sometimes be compelled to resort to tactics which are quite unnecessary at Ox- ford. In the country, when a "mechanics' institute" is opened, the very first thing to he done is to a in the good-will of the ladies. This is generally effected by assembling them together at a great feast of tea and bread and butter, followed by a course of what is vulgarly called "soft soap "—of which it is usually found that any quantity can be comfortably digested. The president administers this, and the ladies go away end make their brothers or friends buy tickets. Something similar was done at Sydney, and it was only on these occasions, we trust, that Dr. Woolley forgot that he was a professor of logic.
The only other fault we have to find with a portion of his lectures is the abundance of Greek quotations they contain. This seems to have a savour of pedantry, when it is considered that the orations were delivered principally to unlearned audiences. But Dr. Woolley conquered the evil habit before he had been long in Australia; in his later lectures there is not only an absence of classical quotations, but an earnest protest against the pro- miscuous use of them. The lecturer justly impressed upen the students at the Sydney School of Arts, that the practice of quot- ing fragments of Latin and Greek in mixed audiences offends and "estranges" hearers or readers, "rudely snapping that bond of intimacy and mutual understanding which it is the speaker's art to strengthen, and which is the surest condition of persua- sive or argumentative success." Nothing, in fact, sooners wears out the patience of an Englishman of the ordinary stamp than this impertinent habit of thrusting Latin or Greek in his
teeth. If the influence of a classical education is not shown in a writer's general style, it certainly cannot be made manifest by the accumulation of scraps of dead-- e languages, which even the illiterate may pile up with the aid of Mr. Bohn's "Dictionary of Quotations." It is surely better to be ignorant of Latin and Greek altogether, than to be possessed with a mania for expressing one's ideas on the macaronie prin- ciple. Nothing is more common, even in the present day, than to find writers really worthy of notice strutting about in pie- bald and pinchbeck classical costumes. It is now generally acknowledged that to represent a man of our owretime dressed in a toga is an absurdity ; but it is not thought incongruous to trick out one's mind in the effete fashions of the past. Perhaps classics are nowhere more out of place than in a newspaper, which is intended not merely for scholars, but for the great mass of Englishmen, and should therefore be written in the language they use and understand—in straightforward English. It would be doubtless unfair to conclude that classical quotations are made in the mere pride and vanity of learning, and from a weak desire to show one's readers how pretty a thing it is to be able to quote Greek, Latin, or Hebrew pat to the purpose ; perhaps in the ma- jority of cases the practice arises from mere habit ; or it is possible that a man may be so accomplished a scholar, as to find it easier to borrow the language of the ancients than to put his own thoughts in plain English. "This style," Dr. Woolley truly remarks, "belongs to the first dawn of popular education, when knowledge still retains her aristocratic air, and awes the vulgar,—it fades of itself with advancing day. . . . Genuine learning is neither obscure nor delusive ; it is rather the timely ray which guides the traveller in an unknown path." The band of quotation- mongers generally do not guide, but simply bewilder. They recall Irving's sketch of the party of authors in the Museum Library, who clothed themselves in borrowed finery to conceal their own rags, and whose writings resembled the contents of the witches' cauldron in Macbeth—" here a finger and there a thumb, toe of frog and blind-worm's sting, with their own gossip poured in like baboons' blood,' to make the medley 'slab and good.'" The great difficulty that Dr. Woolley had to encounter was that which he justly points out as the cause of the failure of mechanics' institutes in England—the want of a previous disci. plinal training in the students. The classes seem, so far as we can judge from the hints dropped in these lectures, to have been well attended at first, but gradually the members fell away, and the process of disintegration, only too familiar to those who teach the untrained, threatened to go forward rapidly. To check this, Dr. Woolley wisely urged that more time should be spent in recreation, and he told the students in one of his lectures* that as a nation "we are not too serious, but too continuously serious; we give ourselves no
• Maitland School Of Art, April 9111, 1857.
intermission—we fancy the world is a large factory, and life a long working day, with the eye of a stern overseer upon us, and the lash ready in his hand." We are afraid that in Australia the mistakes committed by the mother country in this particular have been aggravated. Dr. Woolley's description of the school play-yard, "never ringing with childhood's shouts of glee, but where parade the joyless squadrons of premature men and women," does not give a satisfactory idea of life among the young at the antipodes. But for elder students at the Schools of Art the professor was anxious to find amusement, earl, perhaps a little quaintly, he conceived that the introducti, of women to the occasional " jollifications " of the societies siuld
answer the purpose. It must be owned, as we have already intimated, that when the professor dilates upon women, the
fruits of experience and observation do not shine out so con- spicuously as when he dwells ou more abstruse themes. This is his weakest point. A woman, be observes, has no need for the logical
faculty, for " she feels the truth, and needs none to prove it." The proposition might have been stated with greater exactness. A woman believes that she feels the truth, and will accept no proof to the contrary. She has no use for logic, because she lacks the faculty essential to the reception of logical truth. Dr. Woolley may have felt that chivalry would serve his purpose better than his peculiar weapon, logic, and that to waive his own inclination to appeal to reason, which his lady hearers would not sympathize with, in favour of an appeal to their vanity, which was certain of a response, would be the surest way to promote the interests of the society. Or, on another hypothesis, every man, it is said, has a contempt for his own calling, and Dr. Woolley's calling being to teach logic, he may have felt himself drawn almost in- sensibly into direct affinity with the female mind. At any rate, it is invigorating to read his observations on a subject which has before baffled very learned men—the female character. The ladies of Maitland and Sydney who listened to some of his lectures must have carried away with them a high opinion of learning and its professors. They could not have heard unmoved Dr. Woolley's impassioned hymn of praise in their honour. "They are," he said," the chosen instrument of grafting and preserving in the saul the incarnate word of salvation"— " man without woman (he continued) is a field unvisited by the sun, rank with poisonous vegetation ; woman without man is a sunbeam wandering idly in the void; united, they form a garden breathing with fragrant bloom, and glittering with the golden treasures of the tree of life." (Lecture VI., p. 253.) We can imagine the soft whisperings of delighted applause, the gentle tremors of satisfaction, that were evoked by this tremendous effort of the imagination.
There must have been much marrying in Sydney after this lec- ture—fewer sunbeams, we hope, wandering idly in the void. We should be sorry to think that this would account for tha sub- sequent falling off in the classes, and the lessened enthusiasm shown by the students in the acquirement of knowledge. In another lecture ladies were told that their own extravagant habits, and the tendency they have to idolize riches, are at the bottom of half the misery and vice of the age. This was a bit of plain-speaking; but, unfortunately, it related to one of those very subjects on which women think that they "feel the truth," and pay no attention to proof. It is not their fault if their feel- ings and the truth run counter.
On the topics which came within his immediate province, Dr. Woolley gave most useful advice to the students, and concerning the practice of tolerance especially he exhibited the full powers of his mind. Dean Close, who was so much perplexed by Mr. Maurioe's noble advocacy of perfect freedom of thought, would, probably, be equally confused with Dr. Woolley's arguments. The spirit which the lecturer displays when he argues in favour of the opening of the Crystal Palace and similar places on Sun- day for the working man (Lecture IV.) ; or when he sternly re- bukes the intolerance of' teetotallers" (Lecture IV.); or when he declares that, though Shelley was an atheist, " he was nearer to the God whom he knew not, than they who made him an outcast from his father's home," because be sought truth, though with an "un- disciplined heart" (Lecture VI.) ; or when he maintains that no man should be thought worse of by us because he holds and ex- presses views, even on vital points of religion, contrary to our own ; or when he declares that religious dissensions and persecutions are more mischievous than unbelief (Lecture UL)—such a spirit is possessed by few leaders of thought, or preachers of a message of infinite love and mercy. With one other passage, which we hope Dr. Woolley's hearers have not yet forgotten, we must leave a book which contains much solid thought, and advice that all students might reflect upon with advautage
"We are born into an age of schism ; our holiest instincts and dearest associations prejudice us each in favour of his own community. Neither can demand of the other the surrender of his principles and habits of judg- ment, nor be surprised that the evident and natural to him should be strange and uncouth to a mind differently constituted and trained. What then! Shall I lose my brother because even on impottant twitters our judgments disagree ? Yes ; I must lose the benefit of his conversation to the extent of that d(fereuce. I Stu cut off from many bt,nds of friendship and sympathy ; but I am not cut off from all; and it is my duty, to him and to myself, not by perverseness to forfeit those which I may still re- tain. . . We need not underrate our abstract differences ' • we must only abstain from judging those whom we deem in error. We must take pains to ascertain how much we hold in common, and diligently Use every opportunity of intercourse which that may afford us." (Lecture III-, Pp. 87, 88.)
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