The business of the student in college is to learn literary English as far as he may. To do that he must read and study the best masters of style and compare his work with theirs. In other words, to learn how to write literary English, he must go to what has been written. But how is he to do this? Shall he give his days and nights to Addison, that he may write in Addison's vein, then to De Quincey and Macaulay, that he may imitate the mannerisms of De Quincey and Macaulay? That was once the theory. When the young man comes from the farm to the store or lawyer's office, and essays to learn the forms and modes of polite intercourse in a great city, he notes how men behave in such and such circumstances and shapes his manners accordingly. He does not select some Beau Brummel for a model, and do just what his model does. He considers the when and the why, he finds out the principles, and lets conduct take care of itself in special instances. If we are carpenters, we look at the way our betters have made houses, and profit thereby. If we are locomotive builders, we look at the way other men make engines. At the last World's Fair we perhaps heard much comparison of this sort going on around the English, the French, and the German locomotives. We overhead discussions regarding the effectiveness of this or that device, the saving in friction, the gain in power or speed. So must the college student go to our classic prose writers. If he is in doubt as to his use of conjunctions, let him compare the writer who in that respect is most to his mind. If he finds out he is too labored and formal in showing the relation of clauses by this standard, he will mend his fault without advice or resolution. Likewise, if he finds an author like Matthew Arnold using three clause-connectives per sentence, and a very high percentage of initial and's, he will in so far take such a style as an example of how not to do it, and profit, though negatively, just as much. If he suspects his sentences are too long or too involved to be effective, let him compare the strongest writers upon that point. When he discovers that he turns off periods twice as long as these masters, and loads each down with two or three times as many verbs,

he will get new ideals of form that will ever after unconsciously control his pen. I have known a student drop half his sentence weight in two months' study. The story is in fact worth telling complete. A graduate of a certain college some five years back, writing English neither better nor worse than average bachelors of arts, but ambitious to acquire more readiness and facility of expression, applied to the writer of this article for suggestions to that end. He declared he would gladly give five years of the hardest work, if in the end he might write clearly, strongly, and rapidly. He was advised. simply to investigate the decline in the average of verbs per sentence, and in sentence weight, since Chaucer. By the time the investigation had been carried down to modern authors, the investigator's style had altered conformably to the improvement whose evolution he had traced, all by the operation of unconscious impulses. He soon remarked about it after this fashion: "What has come over me? I can write now. But I haven't been practicing at all!" Now I chance to have been the teacher of college composition myself when this man took that study. I can testify that I declared the whole duty of rhetoric. I told him he must write clearly, that he must write forcefully, that he must write with some degree of elegance. He admitted the obligation, but did none of the things that he was bid. He did not know how, and I could by no means show him. He himself knew his faults about as well as I did, but he could not help committing them. He needed, not rules, but instincts, ideals, to govern his hand and pen when he was not thinking about his style. These accordingly he had awakened or acquired unconsciously while studying out what improvements the chief writers of our literature had respectively made upon each other in the development of present prose standards.

We have been assuming too much that rhetoric is to be taught, not as an art, but as a science. Writing, however, like speaking, is an art and cannot be taught as a science until our pupils have learned it essentially as an art already. We may teach, and perhaps schoolmasters always will teach, spelling,

capitalizing, and punctuation as now, either by rote or rule or both. Beyond that the student must work spontaneously. He must learn first to write as he speaks, either while learning, or after learning, to speak correctly. When he has learned to write as he himself speaks, it remains that he learn to write like other people-to wit, the best minds of his literature and time. At least that should be his aim on entering college; and by the aid and example of his instructors he should be held to actualize it to some degree. But he must not be told vaguely to write literary English. builders to make locomotives light and strong and swift, until they are in some sense masters of their craft, so as to build at will. We cannot show our apprentices in rhetoric the processes by which right English is made. They must learn by taking to pieces the finished product, and comparing earlier and less successful specimens and models. There must be structural parsing, actual anatomizing of styles, enough to know once for all the whole normal economy of the rhetorical body.

It is of no use to ask

It remains to consider English literature in the college, and the preparation for it in primary and secondary schools. The fact that literature is cast, not in the kind of English that the school youth speaks, but in a universalized idiom, terse and weighty in matter, and considerably heavier in vocabulary, constitutes the chief difficulty. The average college student, in his first year of residence, can scarcely read classical English prose with ready understanding, certainly not with edification. Professor McElroy of the University of Pennsylvania puts the case much more strongly. He says: "Out of the thousands of young men who in the last twenty-two years have entered the institution to which our personal knowledge extends, only a few could be said to know their own language. Their vocabulary was scarcely larger than a day laborer's; their powers of observation were of the lowest— of a page of English read by them they could give nothing approaching a satisfactory account; the words had passed before them in marshalled array, only to leave them half

On

blind." Here is again the same gulf fixed between spoken and written English that has been already considered in the first part of this paper. Those of us who have taught in highschool classes know how generally the habit of unrealizing reading prevails. Yet we assume, or have hitherto assumed, that the boy or girl of fourteen can carry the sense in reading and does carry it, just like the rest of us. When they read aloud, we note they enunciate readily and well, and give the correct stress on long book-words. We hence conclude that they read understandingly, and comprehend the sense in the authors they take in hand about as well as they ever will. the contrary, evidence brought to light in recent years establishes beyond question that they comprehend very dimly and incompletely what their eyes see and lips say. The world of books and the world of men are in reality the same, but they have not yet succeeded in bringing these together. Their imaginations are now more active than they will ever be again, but do not respond to the occasions of exercise that books give, as they respond to those in actual life without. This is the difference to be overcome. They must learn the ultimate message out of written words just as they get it out of spoken. They must learn to interpret books just as they read men and things in their daily walks outside. The new plan of using complete books like Ivanhoe and Tales from Shakespere as school readers in the grades, insures greater and more immediate interest than the old stereotyped and often meaningless "reading lesson." It would no doubt be of the greatest advantage if the teacher should first tell the substance of each chapter to the class in his own language before it is read by the pupils, or should read it to them with their books closed-if he can read it effectively enough. That would start imagination; and their own reading will then repeat, enlarge, and perhaps complete the experience. Moreover, there is the strange fact that few public school pupils of the grammar grades can make anything out of poetry, except of a sort far below their years. From observation along this line in various schools I estimate that out of a hundred boys who read Ivan

hoe and Waverley with delight, not so many as five could be induced to read The Lady of the Lake or Marmion. Of such five I am not sure that there would always be even one who would derive any real satisfaction from the reading, while I am sure the rest would all vote it a bore. The trouble is, they read and interpret everything as prose. They learned to read almost exclusively by way of prose compositions. The prose associations of which their minds are full prevent their taking cognizance of poetical qualities or effects. Hence Scott's poetry, though more romantic and imaginative than his prose tales, and better adapted to their years, is inert and meaningless. Of course, among children of the best traditions there. are exceptions; and when such occur they are apt to be exceptions of an extraordinary kind. It takes very great powers of fancy not to suffer deterioration in the usual course of public school training. We insist upon the employment of memory daily, hourly, and minutely. We try our best to get the reasoning powers of our pupils into play. We spend from thirty to thirty-six terms of school work, four exercises per school day, to prepare the young man or woman for college, but we do it all with the perceptive and logical faculties, leaving the sensibilities alone. No wonder Scott's poetry is neglected. He is just as eminently the poet as he is the novelist of boys and girls, of the high-school youth and maiden. But his poetry is not read by these, for they do not read poetry at all. By and by some of those youth will of themselves, by dint of inner refinement and inspiration, and largely in spite of the traditions and influence of school training, divine the secret of poetry. But they will then be men and women, and Scott will be too young for them. They will read Lowell and Stedman and Tennyson. They will buy the usual volume of Scott, and dust it regularly upon their bookshelves. But neither they nor their children will commune with him.

Literature is a thing to be understood and felt; and teachers in the secondary schools must so regard it. To help pupils understand, the reading class should not be let off on simply pronouncing the words in a given exercise. After a paragraph