easy illustrations, we shall be regaled at examination time with a plentiful assortment of such adjectives as "great," "beautiful," "magnificent," but our choice epithet has perished, or if still remembered will probably lie cheek by jowl with another absolutely futile, and perhaps contradictory. It may be remarked in this context that constant reference from English literature to classical or French or German literature will make the boy realise that his ordinary tasks are also literature, and at the same time widen his field for comparison and contrast of style.

The next question is the choice of a book to be specially studied and prepared. Here there are distinct advantages in prose, and such prose as makes the reader think. For instance, De Quincey, Carlyle's "Heroes," Ruskin's "Crown of Wild Olive." The disadvantage of poetry is that love poetry is not much to a boy's taste or very suitable to his age, and of the poetry of nature he very soon has enough. A poem with some kind of story, such as the "Faerie Queene," "The Princess," or "The Idylls," seems the best for the purpose. Occasionally something harder may be taken, "In Memoriam,” or selections from Browning. Shakespeare is, of course, always suitable, but of him they probably know something in earlier forms and in other ways, so that in Sixth Form teaching he should perhaps be sparingly used; Milton may be read now and then, but his beauties are often a sealed book to the young; Chaucer is excellent when the first difficulties are got over. There are good reasons for the books being prepared without notes. Much, of course, may be said on both sides. But the danger is that the habitual laziness of a boy's mind, even an industrious boy's mind, may lead him to fasten on the notes, as things easy of digestion and familiar from old experience of their like elsewhere, tending

to the total avoidance of the labour of thinking, and the almost total neglect of the author himself. To renounce notes no doubt involves one in difficulties. To read Charles Lamb's essays without notes is to miss a great deal of the point, but to read them with notes is probably to lose sight of the beauty of the text. On the other hand, once let a boy appreciate Lamb's peculiar charm, and he has got a κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί

An additional advantage about a prose author is its effects on a boy's style. The ordinary boy's style will be benefited by the study of any good author. The abundance of new and vigorous words, words which just fit the thing they describe, the strong, nervous sentences, which are to be found everywhere in any good prose, are what he needs. The first necessity is to get rid of the housemaid's English, the disjointed mass of anacolutha, wish-wash, and vulgarities which is all that many boys can write. And the effect is immediate and often miraculous. When the class has reached a certain standard, it may be well to fix attention on the merits of certain styles, the picturesqueness of Macaulay, the pure lucidity of Newman, the music of Ruskin. But no one save a clever boy will write Carlylese because he reads Carlyle, and no boy, however clever, should be encouraged to copy an author's peculiarities. If he has a genuine literary gift, he will find his own style; the others should be satisfied with writing English.

Edward Bowen used to maintain that essay writing cannot be taught at school, that the attempt resulted in intellectual conceit and little more. And if you insist on giving a boy abstract subjects, of which he knows nothing, such as "Enthusiasm or "The value of art," before he understands how to write, the result will no doubt be λos Toλus, a degrading, futile, possibly flatulent performance.

But the mere reading of great authors, constant insistence on the proper function of the sentence and paragraph, correction of the worst faults in grammar, vocabulary and construction will work a great change, and enable a boy to turn out an inoffensive, readable piece of work, fairly arranged, reasonably clear, saying with some success what he means to say.

But it is possible to do more than this: to teach English composition with as much care as a piece of Latin prose. French composition is so taught in France. It marks the irony of the situation, and the curious neglect of English composition, that it seems almost preposterous to plead for equal care in English and in Latin prose writing. We may rewrite feeble phrases, putting strong phrases in their place, suggest epigrammatic turns, metaphors, illustrations, remove tautologous or cacophonous expressions, polish and repolish, and teach the pupil to do the same.

Above all, the learner must begin composition young. We may teach the child or young boy to rewrite in his own words a story which has been rapidly read to him of a shipwreck or an escape from prison. A boy of thirteen or fourteen may be told to write a similar story for himself, a few facts being supplied in the first stages and afterwards withdrawn. For boys of sixteen a harder subject may be selected, an essay on some historical event or character about which he has been reading. At seventeen or eighteen he might tackle something more abstract, till such a subject as "Enthusiasm," impossible to the novice, becomes simple enough to a student thus systematically trained. The same system should be pursued in the study of English literature. Every boy should be reading some good author, suited to his age, at every stage in his school life. Young boys would begin with novels, and it would not be

difficult to draw up a list of authors graduated in difficulty for boys of all ages. Composition would advance pari passu with reading, and the subjects on which the boy was to write would often be taken from the book he was reading. The two main principles would be that all boys at all stages of their career would be reading some good book of prose literature, and that no boy should be allowed to write on subjects of which he knows nothing.

English literature so studied would surely be in the first place a valuable instrument of education, for it would teach boys to think. To grasp and restate the meaning of another and greater mind than your own is a most valuable mental exercise. But, in the second place, it would be a possession of immense intellectual and moral value. The mind would be full of great thoughts finely expressed and ordered. A boy so trained would not only "enjoy the great writers" and "know good literature from bad" when he came upon it, but would be inclined to turn from meanness, and prejudice, and vulgarity, towards all that is true, and noble, and inspiring in the world.

"We needs must love the highest when we see it."

VII.

FORM TEACHING.

By A. C. BENSON.

I BELIEVE it was a scientific, and perhaps Teutonic, educationalist, who said that a gathering of individuals could not be represented by the sum of the units that composed it, but that there was a certain unknown quantity, which stood for the effect of the individuals upon each other, which must be added to the sum. Thus, to take the simplest gathering possible, a gathering of two persons, A and B; if x represented the effect of A upon B, and y the effect. of B upon A, the problem of any occasion when A and B met for a united purpose, could be stated simply as (A+y)+(B+x). He summed it up by saying that A and B together formed a cosmic entity. There is truth in the statement, though, like all scientific statements, it suffers from terminological exactitude.

A school-form is a case in point. A schoolmaster has to realise that he is not dealing simply with a collection of individuals, but with individuals modified by the presence of other individuals. But the most important factor of all, the unknown quantity which is far more momentous than all other quantities, is the effect of the master himself upon his form. This is the point which is far too much neglected in the scientific analysis of educational problems--the personality of the teacher. There are some teachers who are negligeable quantities; there are others