of Brutus. 12. Did Cæsar wish to be king? 13. How the speech should be delivered on the stage.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears:
I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones :
So let it be with Cæsar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you, Cæsar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Cæsar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honorable man,
So are they all, all honorable men)
Come I to speak in Cæsar's funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says, he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransom did the general coffers fill.

Did this in Cæsar seem ambitious?

When that the poor have cried, Cæsar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff;

Yet Brutus says, he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.

You all did see, that on the Lupercal

I thrice presented him with a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says, he was ambitious;

And, sure, he is an honorable man.

I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love him once, not without cause;

What cause withholds you, then, to mourn for him?

O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Cæsar,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

B. In his Autobiography Benjamin Franklin tells us of an exercise by which he developed his skill in composition. He took, he says, one of the papers of Addison's Spectator, and, making brief notes of each sentence, laid them aside for a few days. Then, without looking at the book, he tried to complete the paper again in his own words. Sometimes also he jumbled his notes into confusion and after a few weeks endeavored to bring them into the best order. Following his method, see what you can do with the set of notes below. The first nine notes are in the order of the original essay. Notes 10 to 15 inclusive, and notes 16 to 21, have been thrown into disorder; try to reduce them to a natural and logical arrangement. Then try writing the whole essay.

The Character of the Indian.

(Each numbered note stands for one sentence.)

1. A stern physiognomy. 2. Ruling passions: ambition, revenge, envy, jealousy; cold temperament, no effeminate vices. 3. Revenge an instinct, a point of honor, a duty. 4. Pride excessive. 5. Loathes coercion; no menial. 6. Love of liberty. 7. Yet a hero-worshipper; especially war heroes. 8. Reverence for sages and heroes; respect for age, cohesive forces. 9. Love of glory a passion; even

dares torture and death.

10. His warfare: ambuscade and stratagem; never joyous in attack on enemies. 11. Unmirthful in feasts. 12. Generous traits offset by distrust and jealousy. 13. When drunk is maudlin, or crazy. 14. Though brave, will stab secretly. 15. Treacherous, suspicious.

16. Icy coldness to family and friends; grim defiance to torturing enemies. 17. Dignity in assemblies; quiet in

social life. 18. Like snow-covered volcano; wildfire. 19. Conceals passions. 20. No quarrelling at home; solemnity in council. 21. Self-control; discipline.

C. Make a list of the topics discussed in the following; then, without reference to the original, write out in your own words the reasons why you have found the people where you live pleasant people.

I come last to the character and ways of the Americans themselves, in which there is a certain charm, hard to convey by description, but felt almost as soon as one sets foot on their shore, and felt constantly thereafter. They are a kindly people. Good nature, heartiness, a readiness to render small services to one another, an assumption that neighbors in the country, or persons thrown together in travel, or even in a crowd, were meant to be friendly rather than hostile to one another, seem to be everywhere in the air, and in those who breathe it. Sociability is the rule, isolation and moroseness the rare exception. It is not merely that people are more vivacious or talkative than an Englishman expects to find them, for the Western man is often taciturn and seldom wreathes his long face into a smile. It is rather that you feel that the man next you, whether silent or talkative, does not mean to repel intercourse, or convey by his manner his low opinion of his fellow-creatures. Everybody seems disposed to think well of the world and its inhabitants, well enough at least to wish to be on easy terms with them and serve them in those little things whose trouble to the doer is small in proportion to the pleasure they give to the receiver. To help others is better recognized as a duty than in Europe. Nowhere is money so readily given for any public purpose; nowhere, I suspect, are there so many acts of private kindness done, such, for instance, as paying the college expenses of a

promising boy, or aiding a widow to carry on her husband's farm; and these are not done with ostentation. People seem to take their troubles more lightly than they do in Europe, and to be more indulgent to the faults by which troubles are caused. It is a land of hope, and a land of hope is a land of good humor. And they have also, though this is a quality more perceptible in women than in men, a remarkable faculty for enjoyment, a power of drawing more happiness from obvious pleasures, simple and innocent pleasures, than one often finds in overburdened Europe.

As generalizations like this are necessarily comparative, I may be asked with whom I am comparing the Americans. With the English, or with some other attempted average of European nations? Primarily I am comparing them with the English, because they are the nearest relatives of the English. But there are other European countries, such as France, Belgium, Spain, in which the sort of cheerful friendliness I have sought to describe is less common than it is in America. Even in Germany and German Austria, simple and kindly as are the masses of the people, the upper classes have that roideur which belongs to countries dominated by an old aristocracy, or a plutocracy trying to imitate aristocratic ways. The upper class in America (if one may use such an expression) has not in this respect differentiated itself from the character of the nation at large.

If the view here presented be a true one, to what causes are we to ascribe this agreeable development of the original English type, a development in whose course the sadness of Puritanism seems to have been shed off?

Perhaps one of them is the humorous turn of the American character. Humor is a sweetener of temper, a copious spring of charity, for it makes the good side of bad things even more visible than the weak side of good things; but

humor in Americans may be as much a result of an easy and kindly turn as their kindliness is of their humor. Another is the perpetuation of a habit of mutual help formed in colonial days. Colonists need one another's aid more constantly than the dwellers in an old country, are thrown more upon one another, even when they live scattered in woods or prairies, are more interested in one another's welfare. When you have only three neighbors within five miles, each of them covers a large part of your horizon. You want to borrow a plough from one; you get another to help you to roll your logs; your children's delight is to go over for an evening's merry-making to the lads and lasses of the third. It is much pleasanter to be on good terms with these few neighbors, and when others come one by one, they fall into the same habits of intimacy. Any one who has read those stories of rustic New England or New York life which delighted the English children of thirty years ago I do not know whether they delight children still, or have been thrown aside for more highly spiced food will remember the warm-hearted simplicity and atmosphere of genial good-will which softened the roughness of peasant manners and tempered the sternness of a Calvinistic creed. It is natural that the freedom of intercourse and sense of interdependence which existed among the early settlers, and which have always existed since among the pioneers of colonization in the West as they moved from the Connecticut to the Mohawk, from the Mohawk to the Ohio, from the Ohio to the Mississippi, should have left on the national character traces not effaced even in the more artificial civilization of our own time. Something may be set down to the feeling of social equality, creating that respect for a man as a man, whether he be rich or poor, which was described a few pages back; and something to a regard for the sentiment of the multitude, a