interpretative reading. Such reading brings home to sufficiently susceptible students what cannot be lectured about—namely, the intellectually indefinite element of a literary product. Much of what is otherwise done for students, in the way of lecturing, they could do quite as well for themselves.

'A book of criticism,' says Hume, 'ought to consist chiefly of quotations.' The same should be said of a literary lecture, with the important addition to the word 'quotations,' 'effectively read.'

To return from this digression, what seemed so strange to Sir Henry Taylor, is not so strange when it is considered that the dealing out of knowledge, in the schools, on the part of the teacher, and the acquiring of it on the part of students, leave no time for education of any kind except the little which is incident upon the imparting and the acquisition of various kinds of knowledge 'from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall.'

Perhaps the greatest danger to which education proper will be more and more exposed, in the future, will be the great increase of knowledge, in every department of thought. This may sound paradoxical; but with the increase of knowledge, the temptation will correspondingly increase to make the acquisition of the greatest possible amount of it, in schools, colleges, and universities, the leading aim. To give the student the fullest command of his faculties, should certainly be the prime object, to which the acquisition of knowledge should be subservient; but this object seems to be more and more lost sight of, while to cram his mind to the utmost, with vague, indefinite, and heterogeneous knowledge, is getting more and more to be, if not the sole, at any rate the chief, consideration. This state of things prevails from our lowest to our highest schools. We hear and read ad nauseam that the word 'education' means 'a drawing out.' This one etymology everybody knows, if he doesn't know any other. Lecturers and writers on education, and school circulars, keep reiterating it. There are certain truths so ding-donged in our ears that they lose all their vitality. One of these certainly is, that the word 'education' means 'a drawing out.' Sometimes a teacher at a school institute, after presenting this etymology, proceeds to present what he considers the best methods of ramming in!

There are schools, and their patrons think them excellent, which out-herod Herod in their slaughter of the Innocents. Sad, indeed, is it that the young are so debarred, as they are, by the tasks imposed upon them, from all sweet and quickening 'impressions before the letter.' 'As in Hood's exquisite parody of George Robins's advertisement,' says George Henry Lewes in his novel, Ranthorpe, 'the pump is enumerated as having "a handle within reach of the smallest child," so do our illustrious educators wish to place the pump of knowledge within reach of the meanest capacity, that infants may forego the mother's milk to drink of its Pierian spring.' The time must come, it is no doubt in the very far future,—there are no indications, at present, of its being in the near future,—when it will be a pedagogical question how to induce a maximum amount of education with a minimum amount of brain-slaughter.

To get back, now, to the leading subject, vocal culture: a college student whose voice was neglected in early life, and, worst of all, whose sympathies were not then so attuned to good literature, by the influences and atmosphere of his home, that he came to have an inward impulsion to vocalize whatever he specially enjoyed in his reading, will not be much profited by a course in soulless elocutionary spouting. One may have an extraordinary natural gift of vocal expression which is superior to all adverse circumstances; but such an one is a rara avis in terris. Unless there be an early initiation into literature and its vocalization, in advance of the benumbing technical instruction of the schools, much cannot be expected from the great majority of students, in a literary or elocutionary direction. Truly 'illuminative reading,' to use Carlyle's phrase, is, apart from this condition, quite out of the question.

IN the whole range of linguistic and literary studies, English, Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, Spanish, or whatever be the language and literature studied, vocalization should be made of prime importance. So it should even in Anglo-Saxon and early English studies. When I conducted these studies, which I did, for more than twenty-five years, I pronounced to my classes all that was gone over. Beowulf I read to them entire. The interest of students in this Anglo-Saxon epic is much enhanced when it is fluently and vigorously read. It is the only way by which the spirit of the poem can be brought home to them.

To know Chaucer as a poet, and not merely as a writer of fourteenth-century English, his verse, which, after a lapse of five hundred years, continues to rank with the best in the literature, must be voiced; and to voice it, with the best knowledge of its pronunciation which has been attained to by Alexander J. Ellis, in his 'Early English Pronunciation,' and by other phonologists, requires a careful training of the voice and much practice. A susceptible reader comes, in time, to feel, to some extent, what the intonation, also, of the verse, must have been. To inspire students with a permanent interest in 'the morning star of song,' the teacher must be an accomplished reader of his verse, and must train his students to the best reading of it of which they are capable. Of course, a knowledge of the language in its historical development, previous to Chaucer, is desirable, though not indispensable, to appreciate his poetry; but the best vocalization, in the fullest sense of the word, which can be attained to, is indispensable. To know of what earlier inflection any final -e is the residual, is well enough; but I cannot think that any one would insist that such knowledge is indispensable to an appreciation of the poetry. Philology is not the handmaid to poetical cultivation. She can be dismissed altogether from service. There are no emergencies, even, where it is necessary to engage her temporarily.

In the study of Latin and Greek, even with our imperfect knowledge of the ancient pronunciation, and our no knowledge of the ancient intonation, of these languages, it is all important that the student should read Greek and Roman authors aloud. A student who has first been trained to read Greek and Latin prose with fluency and expression can then have considerable appreciation of verse in advance of any technical knowledge. And if he be trained to read in time, he will know what 'quantity' really means. As Latin and Greek verse is read in the schools (when it is read at all), it is accentual, not quantitative. I cannot think that there was any more quantity in Greek and Latin than there is in English, or in any other modern language, unless the Greeks and Romans spoke more in time than we do, which is not likely. The Romans were probably more measured in their speech than the Greeks. Syllables, in Greek and Latin verse, must have been made long or short by an intoning of the verse.

When Vergil, or Ovid, or any hexameter poet, is read in the schools, his verse is the same as that of Longfellow's Evangeline, made up of xa, ax, and axx feet. (