of dwelling on these vital thoughts so admirably expressed.
By the time the oration has been gone through with, and a summary of each paragraph made in the class, a skeleton is ready from which the argument may be considered as a whole. In some schools students will be able to criticise from an historical point of view, and any intelligent boy to whom the oration is given for study should be able to judge of the logic of the plea.
If the "Speech" is to justify its claim to being literature in the higher sense, however, it is not possible to stop with the intellectual study. The question of what constitutes literature is better taken up, it seems to me, near the end of the course of secondary work, if it is to come in at all; but preparation for dealing with that question must come all along the line. When Burke has been studied for his political meanings, his argument summed up and examined, the intellectual force of the parts and of the whole sufficiently considered, then it is necessary to look at the imaginative qualities of the work.
I would never set children to examine any piece of prose or verse for any qualities until I was sure they understood what they are to look for. If they are to examine the oration for imaginative passages, they must first know clearly what an imaginative passage is. Here the previous training of the class is to be reckoned with. Some classes must be taught the significance of the term "imaginative"
by having the passages pointed out to them and then analyzed; others are so far advanced as to be able to discover them. The thing I wish to emphasize is that when the simply intellectual study has progressed far enough, the imaginative must follow. Passages which may be used here are such as these:
My plan . . . does not propose to fill your lobby with squabbling colony agents, who will require the interposition of your mace at every instant to keep peace among them. It does not institute a magnificent auction of finance, where captivated provinces come to general ransom by bidding against each other, until you knock down the hammer, and determine a proportion of payments beyond all powers of algebra to equalize and settle.
Such is the strength with which population shoots in that part of the world, that, state the numbers as high as we will, whilst the dispute continues, the exaggeration ends.
Look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson Bay and Davis Strait, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes and engaged under the frozen Serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress