intended largely to illustrate geography and history.

This effort to put good art into the schools was begun two years ago and will be continued as time goes on.

In several places individual clubs have generously aided in the work by giving pictures to the schools in their respective towns.

The Friday Morning Club in Hillsboro has given a fine copy of "The Sistine Madonna," and the Froebel Club in Columbus a copy of that wonderful "bit of nature and life," "Ploughing in the Nivernais," to the Fieser school. While the Monday Class in Glendale has raised money enough to buy a number of pictures.

MACAULAY.

By J. J. Burns.

As in our literature this year there is a choice between two great English writers it seems fitting to invite one of them to say a few words to introduce the other.

When Lord Macaulay died, Thackeray wrote an appreciative "little sermon," as he called it, and therefrom I quote a few sterling sentences. To the essay on Milton we can turn to see how true the first one is: "Take at hazard any three pages of the Essays or History, and, glimmering below the narrative, as it were, you, an average reader, see one, two, three, a half-score of allusions to other historic facts, literature, poetry, with which you are acquainted."

Now for a moment Thackeray sits in the teacher's chair:-"Why is this epithet used? Whence is that simile drawn? How does he

manage, in two or three words, to paint an individual or to indicate a landscape?" Then, resuming: "Your neighbor, who has his reading, and his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind, shall detect more points, allusions, happy touches, indicating not only the prodigious memory and vast learning of this master, but the wonderful industry, the honest, humble previous toil of this great scholar. He reads twenty books to write a sentence: he travels a hundred miles to make a line of description." In which confident extravagance Thackeray reminds one of the man he lauds so highly. "The critic who says Macaulay had no heart might say that Johnson had Those who knew Lord Macaulay knew how admirably tender and generous and affectionate he was. It was not his business to bring his family be

none.

fore the theatre footlights, and call for bouquets from the gallery as he wept over them." Lowell probably was was translating when he

wrote:

I come not of a race

Who hawk their sorrows in the market place.

The whole of this beautiful tribute is found in English Classics No. 50, entitled Roundabout Papers, wherein upon nine tender pages Thackeray speaks of two great authors recently gone from time, Macaulay and Irving, and saying of either Nil Nisi Bonum. In several of his essays Macaulay has freed his mind upon the subject of historic writing.

He would make history a union. of fact and fiction, of poetry and philosophy; yet these elements. should be so fitted together as to leave a lasting truth in the reader's mind. He would have the writer of history soar with the imagination of Scott, after he had dug with the patience of Hallam. In his essay on History Macaulay wrote: "At Lincoln Cathedral there is a beautiful painted window which was made by an apprentice out of the pieces of glass which had been rejected by his Sir Walter

master.

*

Scott, in the same manner, has used those fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them, in a manner which may well excite their envy.

He has constructed out of their gleanings works which, even considered as histories are scarcely less valuable than theirs."

MACAULAY'S MILTON.

The editions of this famous essay are many and some of them are excellent. I earnestly advise every reader of it to use a well edited edition and go with care over the preface and the introduction. Many years ago it was my fortune to give a local habitation upon one of my modest book-shelves to two pretty large greenish volumes, named upon the cover Macaulay's Essays. Upon these brilliant pieces, dotted all over with literary and historic illusions, as Thackeray truly says, not a penful of learned ink had been shed in helpful annotation, and preliminary matter there was none.

I regret that I did not have at hand such material as is now supplied by the editors upon the many trips I took over my favorite essays. These were Hastings, Clive, Chatham, Milton, Addison, Johnson, Bacon. I should add others now to this short list but not strike off one.

In what I may write under the heading given I must, of course, try to avoid things touched upon. in the special editions so far as they are on my shelf, but I hope to furnish something acceptable in the form of questions, and comments of a mildly supplementary

kind, the "comments" mainly to follow in No. 2.

SPIERINGS INTO MEMORY.

I. By what reasoning does Macaulay reach the conclusion that no poet ever triumphed over greater difficulties than Milton?

2. Macaulay's definition of poetry.

3. Versification in a dead language illustrated by what Metaphor?

4. Write correctly the names of Milton's minor poems.

5. Essential unlikeness of the ode and the drama.

6. To what poem does Macaulay compare Paradise Lost? What contrasts in style?

7. One potent cause, according to Gibbon for the rapid spread of Christianity.

8. What poet wrote the brief, familiar characterization of "three poets in three distant ages born etc."? Name them.

9. Under what conditions was Paradise Lost written?

IO. Milton's political principles.

II. Macaulay's defense of the Great Rebellion-Comparison with the English Revolution.

Macaulay condemn the "taking off" of Charles? How does he excuse Milton for defending it?

15. England's constitution given by Cromwell.

16. The Evil days of Charles II. 17. The character of the Puritans? What habits were "fair game for the laughers"? The source of their contempt for earthly distinctions? The source of their unbending pride?

18. Some good traits of the Royalists.

19. Opinion of Milton's prose writings.

20. Macaulay's fancied visit to Milton.

BIBLICAL QUOTATIONS OR ALLUSIONS IN MACAULAY'S MILTON.

I believe that this running outlook is worth the making.

If there is not a long file of errors of inclusion and of exclusion it is due to the old-fashioned Sunday school and a fairly retentive memory. I do not give hiding to a doubt that there are errors in the following citations, especially of the second sort named. 'Will fresher readers not scan the list, verify and name the location and supply omissions? Then some one send me the criticism. Of course no concordance or other' "pony' should be used.

The figures number the paragraph.

I. A straggling gleaner etc. 20.
Give up their dead. 22.

2.

3. Must first become a little child. 17.

4. The song of our country heard in a strange land. 23.

5. Deity embodied in a human form. 38.

6. A land of darkness where the light was darkness. 44. 7. It is the nature of the Devil of tyranny to tear and rend etc. 66. 8. Neither blindness, nor gout, nor age, nor penury etc. 45.

9. Loosed the knees of the oppressors etc. 49.

IO.

LESSON STORY.

By Ruric N. Roark.

I have said all I can say about the Lesson, in the two chapters on that theme in "Method in Education," so what I shall say in this article will be mercly a variation or amplification of what I have already written. Since "intensity is inversely as extensity" I shall use my space this month to re-emphasize just two rules of the lesson, (pp. 67, 69).

The teacher should, as far as

II. Sect raved against sect. Party plotted against party. 76.

12. Driven out to wander on

the face of the earth. 77.

13. He that runs may readTender Mercies. 79.

14. The Book of Life-Ministering angels-houses not made. with hands--crowns of glory--heaven and earth should have passedthe sun had been darkened etc. 81. 15. Neither part nor lot. 82. 16. Doubting Thomases etc. 84. 17. He cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face. 82.

18. Hating tyrranny with a perfect hatred. 86.

19. Weighed in the balance etc. -Image and superscription-The faith which he so sternly kept. 93.

I call especial attention first to the distinction that exists between "hearing a lesson," and "conducting a recitation." Any parrot can hear a lesson. A well loaded phonograph could do nearly as well as some ill-prepared youths and maidens who draw the salary and sit through the day with a book in hand, asking questions off its pages, and looking thereon to see whether a correct answer has been given. "To hear a lesson," the use of the open book in hand is necessary; to conduct a recitation the book must be laid aside. Anyone who can read with a tolerable degree of understanding can hear lessons; only those who have some permanent and fairly well ordered

knowledge can conduct a recitation. And the ability to dispense with the open text-book is the best test of the minimum amount of knowledge requisite to the proper handling of the recitation. Anyone who assumes to teach should have a "liberal" education, in the true sense of the often misused word "liberal." The education should be sufficient to give freedom, to make the teacher free-free from the tyranny of the text-book, free to ask his own questions, free to judge of the correctness of the answers thereto, free to crack a joke once in a while, free to laugh with his pupils occasionally. Thesc things the teacher whose energies are "cabined, cribbed, confined" within the stingy limits of the textbook can never do. If you go into a dark room with only a wax match for light, you must walk carefully, groping a way about among the obstacles to progress. If there is a blazing are light in the room, you find your course easily and without hesitation. The teacher who goes into the recitation with so little knowledge that he must constantly supplement it by reference to the open book in the presence of the class has literally to grope his way about in the subject he has no freedom of movement. The one who knows enough about the subject to dispense with the text in the presence of his pupils has the arc light, or something approximating it, and

can move with ease and comfort in and out among the difficulties of the lesson.

The teacher who screws up his courage to lay aside his book while facing a class will feel at first as the poor swimmer does when he suddenly finds himself out of his depth, or when he has to let go his supporting board. The poor teacher flounders, and gasps, and splutters about hopelessly, but he soon gains confidence and then most thoroughly and for the first. time really enjoys his class exercises. There can be no enjoyment of one's work where the knowledge is so scant that the book must be referred to after each answer. One of the first things a young teacher finds out for himself is that a reciting knowledge of a subject is far short of a teaching knowledge of it. He may have made a "grade," when he himself was a student in school, of 100 per cent in a subject, but when he comes before his class for the first time to handle a recitation in that subject he will clutch at his text-book as a drowning man at a rail, and is desperate if he has to let it go. The first good result, then, of dispensing with the textbook during recitation is that the teacher is thus forced to master his subject, to get a real working, teaching knowledge of it.

A second result is a great increase of confidence in the teacher and his power, on the part of the pupils. The teacher has no right