PREFACE.

The following lectures form part of a series read before the Senior and Junior Classes of Trinity College. They are printed in the hope that they may be of service to other young men than my pupils, for whom they were originally designed.

As they were written for young men, some positions are assumed as postulates, which, if I had been originally addressing the public, would have been strengthened by illustration, and, on the other hand, some propositions are argued, which, I suppose, most people of mature age take for granted. As they were written for oral delivery to students, and their object was educational, not critical, I trust the ex-cathedra tone will be pardoned. I thought to recast them into a more systematic form and to strike out some of the repetitions which in oral discourse are so necessary to the enforcement of a point, but I judged that whatever value or interest they might have, depended on the circumstances under which they were written, and besides

they are associated in their present form, in my mind, and I trust in the minds of my pupils, with many pleasant hours.

All exercises in teaching must be regarded primarily, in the mind of the teacher, as drill, and, in the mind of the pupil, as tasks. Lectures on literary subjects, however, may safely be regarded as instruction,—as an endeavor to build something in the mind on the foundation laid by drill. From the students' notes on these lectures I have learned something of the kind of ideas most readily assimilated by minds of different bents and in different periods of development. Except in cases of special aptitude for generalization, it is first necessary to interest young men in a person, Shelley, Dr. Johnson, and Goldsmith are especially valuable for this purpose. After interest in a person is aroused it is not so difficult to extend it to a group or to a period, and, lastly, to the general ideas which characterize a period. But if the abstractions are presented first they are invariably, and rightly, rejected.

My indebtedness to the ordinary sources, especially to Mr. Arnold, Mr. Myers, Mr. Symonds, and Principal Shairp, is too evident to require acknowledgment. Where I have used the words of another I have endeavored always to indicate the fact by marks of quotation, and I

have done so in many instances when I was conscious of using an expression recalled from I knew not where. I am under the impression, however, that in the last paragraph of the lecture on Emerson I have used some material from a magazine article I read at the time of his death. If I have done so, I hope the author will consider that I hereby make the proper acknowledgment, and absolve me from the obligation of looking up his name in Poole's Index.

TRINITY COLLEGE, June, 1885.

C. F. J.