often expressed in strong language, are wrong and perverted judgments. For youthful readers he may be accepted as a safe guide. His exaggerated expressions are never intended to conceal insufficiency of knowledge. He never indulges in mere conventional phrasing, the besetting sin of young and ambitious writers. He is absolutely sincere and original. Familiarity with such a writer during the period of life when habits are forming must be altogether wholesome.

The English teacher will naturally find an advantage in reading with his class selections that discuss his own especial theme. As lessons in literary history, as well as lessons in English composition, these studies will be fruitful and memorable. In connection with the incidental researches which they suggest, they will constitute an opportunity for the acquisition of knowledge, and for the general discipline of the taste that, from the pedagogic point of view, lacks absolutely no element of desirableness.

Such reading as is here offered the young student must be done as work, not as mere amusement. The pencil must be kept in constant use, and the note-book must be always at hand. The student must be his own annotator. No more in reading a piece of English than in working out an algebra lesson should the learner expect to have his work done for him. Only what he earns will he ever possess, though what he borrows from another, or has given him, may meet the requirements of an examination.

No pedagogic maxim can be adduced that shall favor giving the learner results without leading him through the processes through which the results were obtained.

Results without research are dead and useless. Research without results is excellent and vital, because always accompanied with hope. Notes are usually a mere incubus upon interest. They put an obstacle in the way of the teacher, who would like to exercise his skill by leading his pupils through the various stages of growing curiosity and zealous search up to the consummation of successful finding. Those editors who steal from the teacher his opportunity of teaching are really his worst foes. Strange ideas of the pedagogic province seem to be held by annotators who try to tell the pupil everything, as if all the teacher had to do was to ask questions and get things told again, — re-cited.

As there is appended to the essay on Milton here presented a brief selection of "notes," the annotator desires to explain exactly what ground these notes cover, and for what purpose they were prepared. In nearly every case where a note appears, it will be found to ask a question or to suggest a bit of research, with a hint as to the direction in which the research must be made. In no instance is a note given where the needed investigation is obvious and can be readily planned. That any notes at all of this kind are given is hereby confessed to be, so far forth, a trenching on the proper field of the teacher, whose duty it is to prescribe tasks and furnish the needful helps for their performance; and the annotator accordingly offers his apologies to those teachers who find his suggestions superfluous, and he would rejoice to be able to think that all teachers belonged to this class. On the proper field of the pupil, however, he has not trenched. If, like a visitor to the class-room, he has asked a few ques

tions that the teacher would soon have asked himself, he has not thwarted the teacher by whispering to the pupil his answers. The great bulk of the annotable matter has been left without annotation, in order that the activity of the student may find free play. Only where the possibility or the desirableness of incidental reading has been somewhat less obvious, has any question been asked, and only when the books to be consulted have been such as would not instantly suggest themselves, have hints been given as to what to read.

Occasionally the needed research has been a little troublesome to make. In a few such cases results have been given, in view of the fact that the book is destined for use by young persons whose time is limited, and that investigable matter, in any Macaulay text, is already superabundant. The annotator believes that he has omitted no difficult point. Allusions not noted he has thought fairly within the reach of high-school classes. A considerable portion of the entire mass of the notes is occupied by quotations of interesting relevant passages that should be read in connection with the text.

It sometimes happens that Macaulay names an obscure and unimportant person with some epithet, or in connection with a context, that sufficiently explains this person's appearance, so that any note at all becomes needless. It is by no means always necessary to run to the biographical dictionaries when a name appears. Sometimes investigation will reveal only so much as the author himself tells in a word or two, and to find even this will cost time. If Macaulay says a writer is worthless, it is no increase of knowledge to find in what year

such writer wrote his worthless book. Discrimination is necessary in reading pieces so overcharged with allusion. It is only the ancient classics whose every word is precious. The reader of English must reach the end of the chapter. Infinite other chapters await his eager attention. Hence the English reader must learn to recognize and set aside what is unimportant. Even the unimportant things will gradually gain significance as the reader's acquaintance with literature extends, and the young reader must not at the outset be too much loaded with erudition whose relation to what he is studying he cannot appreciate.

But by far the greater portion of Macaulay's allusions must be worked out with whatever labor of research is necessary to make them yield their meaning. This labor constitutes the getting of the lesson. A lesson in English literature should be got by a method analogous to that which, in the physical sciences, has already come fully into vogue, and is sometimes called the laboratory method. In physics it is no longer customary to let a student merely read a formula and witness an experiment. He must himself conduct the experiment, observe the phenomena, and deduce and formulate the law. In literature the entire mass of phenomena lies concealed in books. The art of research is here the art of using libraries. A beginner is bewildered as he confronts a large library. Gradually he acquires skill and begins to find things with ease. The labor of this search is pleasant, and the successes give it zest, while the tantalizing failures pique and stimulate perseverance. The study of history, which the learner is carrying on at the same time with his English, is also a library

study, and the same familiarity with books which he gains in the one helps him in the other. Thus these studies are manifestly such as cannot be carried on while the student sits motionless at a desk and pores over a single book. The method of explanatory notes presupposes a dead learning-by-heart, with the young people sitting in straight lines, their eyes fixed on their lessons, their thoughts bent on committing these lessons to memory. The library method assumes a collection of books and such freedom of movement as choice and consultation of them necessarily imply. It assumes, moreover, pleasant and free relations with the larger libraries outside the schoolroom that all American communities are rapidly coming to possess.

The present editor has had in view schools of secondary grade; that is, high schools and academies. He has taken for granted that such schools have collections of books, just as, if he were preparing a text-book of physics, he would take for granted the presence in the schools of proper laboratories. There is no such thing as reading one book without the help of other books. There must be perpetual reference from book to book. This is the case even in easy reading. In reading that is perpetually setting tasks of elucidation and verification the presence of a good reference library becomes an absolute necessity. The best dictionaries, the best encyclopædias, the standard histories and biographies, complete editions of the principal authors, must be always within reach of the student. It is not the business of a pedagogic editor to dispense readers from the necessity of procuring the means of research. Rather is it his province to show readers how to conduct research and what apparatus of research is most serviceable.