undervalue in daily life acquaintance with the more refined side of human knowledge, the fact remains that to betray ignorance in these lines may bring real harm to a person's social standing. Every one recognizes that among educated people a lad is better able to make his way if he does not confound the age of Shakespeare with that of Browning, and if he is able to distinguish between Edmund Spenser and Herbert Spencer. Such information may not be specially vital, but it is worth possessing.
Considerations of this sort, however, are evidently not of weight enough to account for the place of the study in the schools, and still less to excuse the amount of time and attention bestowed upon it. The same line of reasoning would defend the introduction of dancing, because
Those move easiest who have learned to dance.
More important and more far-reaching reasons must be found to satisfy the teacher, and to hearten him for the severe labor of working with class after class in the effort, not always successful, of arousing interest and enthusiasm over the writings which go by the name of English Classics. Some of these I may specify briefly. To deal with them exhaustively would take a book in itself, and would leave no room for the consideration of methods.
A careful and intelligent study of masterpieces of prose or verse, the teacher soon perceives, must
develop greatly the student's sense of the value of words. This is not the highest function of this work, but it is by no means one to be despised. Literary study affords opportunities for training of this sort which are not to be found elsewhere; and a sensitiveness to word-values is with a child the beginning of wisdom.
Children too often acquire and adults follow the habit of accepting words instead of ideas. A genuine appreciation of the worth of language is after all the chief outward sign of the distinction between the wise man and the dullard. One is content to receive speech as sterling coin, and the other perceives that words are but counters. If students could but appreciate the difference between apprehending and comprehending what they are taught, between learning words and assimilating ideas, the intellectual millennium would be at hand. Children need to learn that the sentence is after all only the envelope, only the vehicle for the thought. Everybody agrees to this theoretically, but practically the fact is generally ignored. The child is father to the man in nothing else more surely than in the trait of accepting in perfect good faith empty words as complete and satisfactory in themselves. The habit of being content with phrases once bred into a child can be eradicated by nothing short of severe intellectual surgery.
To say that words are received as sufficient in themselves and not as conveying ideas sounds like a paradox; but there are few of us who may not at
once make a personal application and find an illustration in the common phrases and formulas of our life. Perhaps none of us are free from the fault of sometimes substituting empty phrases for vital rules of conduct. The most simple and the most tremendous facts of human life are often known only as lifeless statements rather than realized as vibrant truths. With children the language of text-book or classroom is so likely to be repeated by rote and remembered mechanically that constant vigilance on the part of the teacher can hardly overcome the evil. Force the boy who on the college entrance examination paper writes fluently that "Milton is the poet of sublimity" to try to define, even to himself, what the statement means, and the result is confusion. He meant nothing. He had the words, but they had never conveyed to him a thought. Language should be the servant of the mind, but never was servant that so constantly and so successfully usurped the place of master.
Children must be taught, and taught not simply by precept but by experience, to realize that the value of the word lies solely in its efficiency as a vehicle of thought. They must learn to appreciate as well as to know mechanically that language is to be estimated by its effect in communicating the idea, and that to be satisfied with words for themselves is obvious folly. For enforcing this fact literature is especially valuable. It is hardly possible in even the most superficial work on a play of