4. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her greatest work (Uncle Tom's Cabin), and its influence upon American history. 5. Ralph Waldo Emerson. The peculiarities of his style; his boldness of thought and originality of treatment; the frequency of his apothegms. 4. The Lexicographers. 1. Noah Webster; his Dictionary (completed in 1828); his reforms in spelling; his influence on our language. 2. Joseph E. Worcester; his Dictionary (completed in 1846); his erudition; his conservatism; the value of his work. CHAPTER XIII TEACHERS' READING CIRCLES The New Profession. - When Henry Ward Beecher delivered his famous lecture on The New Profession, he was greeted from every side with the remark, "Why, teaching is not new; it is as old as the hills!" The advancement of any calling from a humble rank among the occupations of men to one commensurate with its true dignity and importance is a noteworthy step in human progress. The trade of the teacher is as old as recorded history. The profession of teaching is new. The difference between the two is really very great, though the transition from the one to the other has been so gradual that it is not yet fully realized or even admitted by many. Likewise, the profession of the clergyman struggled long for recognition. Speaking of the comedies of Shadwell and Van Brugh, a writer remarks: "Perhaps no picture that they drew appears to be more outrageously libelous than that of the clergyman. It would seem impossible that, in the social gatherings of representative people, where attorneys and counselors, physicians and authors, were the boon companions of knights and lords, the minister was excluded from the best of the feast over which he had invoked the divine blessing, and was expected to associate chiefly with the servants in the kitchen. It seems incredible that he should never have aspired to the hand of a maiden of higher social rank than a cook. Yet Macaulay has shown that these representations were generally truth ful and correct, so far as the clergy was concerned, and has furnished additional details of the desperate condition of the English rectors of two centuries ago. And Swift, the great Irish dean, declared that even in his day a pastor was deemed an undesirable suitor for an ignorant waiting maid, unless her character had been so injured by scandal as to preclude all hope of her marrying a butler or a steward. And these were ministers of the Established Church, the noblest ecclesiastical organization of which the English gentlemen could conceive. Under circumstances which must have rendered him an object of compassion or of contempt to the very servants of great houses, the faithful pastor labored and struggled. Through generations the inherent nobility of the ministerial calling asserted itself; and it has long been splendid in its social influence, its intellectual and moral power, and its temporal endowments." "Why do we complain," said Col. Francis W. Parker, some years ago, "that we, as teachers, are kept down; that our salaries are poor; that we, like 'Poor Joe,' must 'move on' so frequently; that it is a question whether teaching is a profession or a trade; that we take rank socially below the minister, the lawyer, and the doctor; that the school boards and parents refuse to allow us to educate the children; that newspapers and learned authorities pour such a flood of criticism upon our work; that we must look beyond this world for the reward of our patient toil? "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, "What we complain of are realities, and terrible realities too. I suppose it is owing to the fallen or weak nature of man that he seeks for causes of every evil outside of himself. . . . We are here to make conditions. Complaints of others and of circumstances sink into complaints of self, when we catch one glimpse of the immense possibilities for improvement in ourselves and in our pupils." |