of Dante, he remains as the finest interpreter of the heart that the world has ever known. The story of "The Merchant of Venice," full of the interest of romance when we are very young, becomes later a criticism of life, a treasure-house of philosophy, the tragedy of a soul and of a nation. It is the material, properly used, with which the teacher may work wonders for the solace of middle life, for the consolation of old age. In truth, if all the "rhetorics" were taken away, and the teacher were to use "Hamlet" or "King Lear" or "The Merchant of Venice" or "As You Like It," as physicists use substances in their laboratories, we should have clearer-headed men and women, very easily expressing themselves,-for, in English at least, there can be no rules of rhetoric capable of vitalized application which are not drawn from the practices of the masters. Dr. Rolfe has an admirable page on the teaching of elementary rhetoric by the inductive method.1

"In the reading of poetry," Professor Rolfe says, "the essential principles and laws of versification may be taught, the pupil being made to deduce them for himself from the poem before him; it is the right time for learning what children of larger growth often fail to acquire. The young child never errs in the rhythmical rendering of Mother Goose,. that classic of the nursery; but adults and teachers, and sometimes even college professors, who have lost the childish sensitiveness to the music of verse, will often blunder in reading or reciting Shakspere." Mr. Rolfe further indicates the use of those masterpieces in the teaching of elementary rhetoric. All young persons use tropes in daily conversation. "The small boy, who is so much given to similes that when he is hard up for a mere specific comparison he will say 'like anything,' making up in emphasis what the expression lacks in point and precision, will not be slow to recognize that sort of thing in the printed page if you call his attention to it. He will pick out the similes and metaphors as readily as the nouns and verbs and explain the resemblances on which they are based as easily as the syntax of subject and predicate. To note and name these figures soon becomes a merely mechanical process-much like parsing, and as profitless; but to see whether

***The Elementary Study of English," W. J. Rolfe, Litt. Dr.; Harper & Bros.

the figure is apt or expressive or beautiful, and to find out and explain why it is so, is a practical lesson in truth and criticism."

The material for these exercises is supplied by any of the great plays of Shakspere. No English author gives, ready at hand, such a wealth of objects on which to expend mental energy. The skilful teacher has long ago discarded the volume of "elegant extracts." It was Walter Savage Landor who, I think, said of somebody's sonnets that he did not like his sentiment cut up into little patty pans. The book of "elegant extracts" may, as a rule, be classed with these mechanical sonnets. But "Macbeth," "King Lear," "Hamlet," "Julius Cæsar," "The Tempest," "As You Like It" may be so used that they accompany the student through his whole life, perennially giving forth new means of enjoyment and culture.

Who has not noticed the ease with which intelligent readers of Shakspere acquire the inflections of his verse? And when, by practice, the metrical and rhythmical swing of his verse has become a thing of habit, a finer appreciation of all verse forms in English becomes no difficult matter. It has been often remarked that, while the teaching of English occupies so large a space in the catalogues of the intermediate schools,-all those above the rudimentary grades,—and in undergraduate university courses, a knowledge of the musical charm of English verse is exceedingly rare. The elocutionists of the older days insisted that blank verse should be read as prose, and the prosier you made your cadences and the more redundant were your gestures, the more satisfactory your "elocution" was supposed to be. The cunning music of Jacques' famous speech, beginning "All the world's a stage," was lost because it was understood that while it might be scanned in classes according to outworn Greek or Latin rules, its metre has no relation whatever to the uttering of it; and so when the "elocutionist," struggling to beat the five-accented Shaksperian iamb into dull monotony, spoke of the "whining schoolboy," he pointed to an imaginary satchel, and when he described the lover "writing a woeful ballad to his mistresses' eyebrow" he touched his own, and only a very nice sense of propriety prevented him from an appropriate gesture when he alluded to the justice:

"In fair, round belly, with good capon lined."

After many years it has been discovered that when a poet writes in verse he means to produce an effect through the ear, not only through the eye,—that when Shakspere wrote in prose he fitted the form to the feeling, and that he intended that all his exquisite metrical interweaving of verse melody should be given by the only instrument capable of uttering them,- that speaking voice which the pedagogues too much neglect. To what better use can the scene between Lear, mad through pride, adulation-fed, and his daughters be put than in the training of the concealed qualities of the voice? When a young woman can utter Cordelia's words,-"so young, my Lord, and true, with the simplicity and the musical flow that follows, "so young and so untender," she has learned more than all the rules of scansion can teach her.

It was my intention to touch on some further uses of Shakspere in the art of pedagogy, especially where philology and history are concerned and analysis and comparison are so necessary; but I find that I have already made this paper longer than I wished,-yet I have only slightly sketched processes which are, with advantage, applied to the works of the greatest of all English masters in literature.

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN.

THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN COLLEGIATE

TRAINING.

Before setting out to argue the claims of any science, or group of sciences, to a place in our collegiate curricula, it is well to make clear the concept of collegiate education that serves as a major premise for the discussion.

The premise from which this paper starts is, that the aim of the college-in so far as it is intellectual-is to give the student a symmetrical mental development, to train all the faculties of his mind, and to beget in him the power of consciously directing them. The thesis advocated is, that some study of the Social Sciences is necessary for the attainment of this symmetrical development.

The function of the college, as here understood, is to do for the mind what a well appointed and well directed gymnasium aims to do for the body,—an analogy recognized in the German system of education by the application of the name "gymnasium" to those schools of secondary grade that aim at a liberal training.

In the physical gymnasium it is recognized that certain forms of exercise are specially adapted to the development of particular sets of muscles; and that the symmetrical development of the whole muscular system, --the development that gives to the body strength, poise, and agility and grace of movement,—is secured only by a suitable combination of varied forms of exercise.

This conception of the function of a college will be readily granted by the advocates of a fixed curriculum that aims to give the student what is termed a "liberal" education,-or perhaps it would be better to say the "basis" for a liberal education. It cannot be too much or too often emphasized that education is the matter of a life-time, and that the most the college or the university, or both together, can do is to lay deep and strong the foundations for future building up.

The root idea of fixed collegiate curricula recognizes that different studies are peculiarly adapted to the training of this

or that faculty of the mind; and the proposition underlying any curriculum laid down as a required course for a degree that proclaims a "liberal" education is that a symmetrical mental development is best attained by the combination of studies there outlined.

Despite the attacks that have been made against it, the principle here embodied is a correct one. The best arguments in its favor are unwittingly furnished by those who oppose it. The rage for specialization is daily furnishing an abundance of objective proof that the study of a single branch of knowledge, however profound and extensive that study may be, is in itself inadequate for a symmetrical mental development. The "narrow specialist" has become a byword; and we have to admit that too often the result of what we term the "higher education" is a creature highly skilled in the technique of some particular science, but devoid of the wider philosophic grasp, afflicted with a sadly distorted mental perspective, and, despite his education, an utter Philistine.

This may be the inevitable price we have to pay for the undoubted benefits of that specialization for which the modern university stands. But it is none the less an evil, and one that ought not to be allowed to creep into the domain of collegiate training. A tendency towards this narrow, onesided development cannot fail to result from any radical electivism in collegiate work that allows a student wholly to exclude from his course one or several groups of science. Left free to his own choice, the average student will naturally select his studies according to his instinctive likings, which in turn will probably correspond to his elemental aptitudes. But this, instead of being to his ultimate advantage, will bring it about that in the end the very faculties that most needed to be called into action and developed will be the ones that have been ignored and that have in consequence remained undeveloped. The result is a half-educated man. The saner method, as adopted in physical training, is to lay stress on those very forms of exercise that tend to develop the muscles or organs which examination has shown to be the weakest.

It does not follow, however, that this danger of a one-sided mental development is avoided by clinging to a fixed curricu