range of the average boy of fourteen or fifteen. He would not enjoy them if he had them in English.

When it came to Greek, I had another affair. Francis Gardner broke us into Greek, he was then a young man. Afterwards he was a distinguished leader in this matter of education in language. He permitted no mis-steps, no nonsense of any sort, indeed. What we learned, we learned, and it was right from the beginning. So it is that I always read Greek decently well, and to this day enjoy Greek literature more than I do Latin literature. Greek is, indeed, a better language, for all purposes of language. It would be hard to say how much the world has been set back by what one calls accidental limitations of the Latin language. Mr. Francis Gardner was a great deal more than a good Greek scholar. He was a thoroughly just man, true and honorable. I know that, as an old man, he was thought hard, and I suppose he But this must have been due to the ruinous effect of arbitrary power, which is bad for anybody, be he schoolmaster or emperor. In my day at school and afterwards when I was an usher there, he carried with him into his room that atmosphere of integrity, honest purpose, and straight-forwardness which very much impresses boys. What boys want is that everything shall be fair. “Gardner's always fair," they would say. The son of a rich India wharf merchant, or some little North-ender who never had his shoes blacked, were alike before him. Truth, honor, and good intention were all he cared for. He did not make the mistake which teachers are apt to make, of valuing a bright boy more than a stupid boy, if only the stupid boy meant well, that was "all Gardner asked for."

was.

δόξα

I remember his spending an hour over a question I raised, purely that he might do me justice. The Greek word "doğa went down the class. He wanted us to say that it meant "glory." I offered as a meaning, "honor," guessing, I suppose; for I do not recollect that any of us knew anything about it. When it proved that "glory was right, I said that "honor" was a good enough substitute; that the words might be used interchangeably. Probably I was wrong. But he eventually yielded the point to me very frankly, after he had worked over the dictionaries, and tried various citations to see how the sense would go, if the words were changed. The boy of eleven feels the implied compliment, if you please, thus paid to him. He never said anything about

our moral nature to us; but we understood that he threw us on our honor. Indeed, the tone of honor in that school was very high. I do not think that, of 150 boys in it, there was one boy who dared to tell a lie.

I have heard Mr. Gardner in after times say pathetically, that with four parents out of five, if you said, "Your son is a dull boy; but he is perfectly true and honorable," they would not be satisfied. But if you said, "Your boy is the brightest boy in the class; but I am sorry to say he does not seem to me to be as strict as he should be in telling the truth," the father would go off much better pleased than the other father would be. Let us hope that this was the exaggerated statement of a man very strict in his notions about such affairs.

The course of the Latin school was then five years. This means that the boy began in that business of committing Adam's Latin Grammar to memory, so that he could repeat what was marked of it verbatim from one end to the other; and came out. with a decent ability to read Virgil, to read what he could understand of Cicero, and to read the passages in the Greek Reader. He also had picked up an average working knowledge of algebra, and a good basis of arithmetic. There was a pretence of geography. But when I was examined for college, twelve of us in succession, from one training-school and another, said that London was north of Amsterdam, and no boy in the section even guessed at the truth.

I had entered the school a year in advance, so that I had read in four years "Viri Romae," Phaedrus's "Fables," Nepos's "Lives," Sallust's "Catiline" and "Jugurtha," some twenty orations of Cicero, and Virgil's "Bucolics," "Georgics," and the "Aeneid." This means, as I am told by my accomplished friend, Mr. Collar, as much in quantity as two of Dickens's novels. Somehow or other they managed to spread it over four years. I remember, however, that I was absent from school when the boys read the first half of the "Aeneid," so I went up to the top of the house the day before we went to be examined at Cambridge, and read the first six books in one afternoon. I am quite sure that we should help in the matter of learning Latin and Greek, if we put a good deal of such rapid reading at sight in, as a relief from the careful grammatical handling of a page or two.

It is the fashion to say that Harvard College was then nothing

but a high school. This is true enough so far as the forms went. That is to say, we went into a recitation room and recited exactly as we had done at school. The modern language men felt that they were initiating us into a literature. They interested us in Molière, Racine, Tasso, Dante, Schiller, Goethe, and other authors in their respective lines. But I do not remember a single word said, in the Latin or the Greek recitation-rooms about, anything but a rule of grammar. The consequence was that, when, at the end of the junior year, we were relieved from Latin and Greek, I threw both those languages over for a year. By great good fortune, I had to teach them both afterwards; and so began an acquaintance with both the literatures. But for this I owe no thanks to any college teacher. In the French, German, Italian and English languages, however, my college experience was wholly different. Edward Tyrrell Channing had the charge of the English department, and the men of that time owe to him any ability to write the English language. This is a rare gift at the present time. Longfellow was put in charge of the Modern Language department. I was almost entirely ignorant of French when I entered college; and at the end of my Junior year, I could read French better than I could read Latin or Greek. I think something like this would be said by most men, and I think the teachers of the "classical schools" ought to tell us why boys do not learn more of the two languages in which most pains are taken.

I was a good deal bored in college, not by the men in the class,men they called themselves, though they were not twenty years old, but by the rules and the teachers. Still I look back on college with great pleasure, and am very glad I was there. The theory still held, which seems to me the true theory, that, in a young man's education the specialty shall be kept out of sight as long as possible. The college was carried on on this principle. Whatever was to follow it, -law, the ministry, a doctor's life, a civil engineer's, a schoolmaster's, or a merchant's, all of us had the same training for it while we were there.

This means that each of us was taught the language of his time, so far as that college knew how to teach it.

Thus, if, the day after I left college, I had been in the company of an astronomer, a chemist, a geologist, an engineer, a botanist, a farmer, or a musical composer, and he were talking

intelligently of his profession, I should have understood the words he used. If I had the wit to hold my tongue, I should have learned something. To take the last instance. We had been taught, up to a certain point, the laws of musical composition. I knew how to transpose the notes of an air from one key to another key; I knew why it was done, and, in a fashion, how it was done. For the theory of the place was that every man who left it was to be so far instructed in the English language as used in his own time. So I knew, up to a certain point, why, in the newly created railroads, one shape of rail was better than another. And every man in my class knew it, or had had a chance to know it. If a man spoke of re-agents in chemistry, we knew what he was talking about. There was not one of us fit to undertake any work which the world wanted. But it was supposed that we knew enough to listen intelligently to the men who could undertake such work.

This was what was meant by a liberal education, as contrasted with a "special education." It was then supposed that the education for a specialty would follow the "liberal education attempted in the college.

"

THE

COMPOSITION.

BY KATHERINE H. SHUTE.

Assistant in the Boston Normal School,

HE term composition, in this paper, will be used to include all written work in which the expression is original with the pupil; the thought may or may not be original. This definition, it will be seen, includes everything from the briefest statement which the child may write in answer to a simple question, provided the expression be his own, to the most elaborate attempt at essay writing by the advanced student. I shall confine myself, mainly, however, to the work done in primary and grammar grades.

With this definition and limitation in mind, I invite a brief consideration of the following points: First, the value of composition in education; second, the preliminary work which serves as a preparation for composition; third, the choice of subjects; fourth, methods of conducting the composition exercise; fifth, the neces

sary training for teachers of the subject; and, in conclusion, composition viewed in its relation to reading.

What claims has composition to a recognized place in our courses of study? Both fallacies in thought and weak and inadequate expression, it will be granted, are much more readily detected when the pupil attempts to express himself in writing. He feels more dissatisfied when the result of his slipshod thinking faces him from the written page than when he produces equally shabby oral work, and becomes ambitious to express himself more clearly; for often he does not recognize the fact that the fundamental trouble is in his thought and not in his expression of it.

But clear expression is dependent upon clear thinking, is, indeed, impossible without it; and what is more the effort toward clear expression, the effort to impart thought to others, reacts upon thinking and forces it to be more discriminating. In its reactionary effort upon thought, it seems to me, lies the chief value of composition work.

In the second place, added power in the use of clear, forcible, elegant English is a result which we have a right to expect from judicious practice in the art of composition.

Again, composition may be used effectively as an incentive to the imagination; because even the simpler processes of composition require a re-combining of the materials with which the mind is already stored, while the higher forms of the art call for the highest and most far-reaching activity of the creative imagina

tion.

Finally, composition may be so employed as to awaken a more intelligent and sympathetic appreciation of literature; inasmuch as the effort to produce work of any kind leads an intelligent and candid mind to value more justly the work of others in the same field.

That it renders thought more discriminating, increases the power of expression, incites the imagination to greater activity, and develops an appreciation of literature: these are the claims which entitle composition to an honorable place in our school programs.

Admitting the claims of composition, what training shall be given little children from the time they first enter school until they are ready to take their first feeble steps in the art? Since in the natural order of things, oral expression precedes written,