Well, we who are interested in the reading of good books will make up our minds to get by hook or crook a little taste of some language besides English. If we truly care for poetry we shall try to read Vergil and Homer and Dante and Goethe. To become gradually familiar with one great foreign poet, so that we know him as we know Shakespeare, is to conquer a whole new world. The easiest books to read in a foreign tongue are prose fictions, in which the interest of the story spurs the reader on and makes him eager for the meanings of the words. Text-book publishers issue inexpensive editions of modern French and German fictions, which are, of course, selected by the editors with a view to their fitness for young readers. The French or German book which has become a recognized classic in its native land and is considered by editors of school books to be a good classroom text is likely to have universal literary qualities, simplicity, purity of style, and right-mindedness. I find in admirable inexpensive texts representative stories by Dumas, Zola, George Sand, Halévy, Daudet, Pierre Loti, Balzac, Hugo, About, and other French masters, and by Freytag, Baumbach, Sudermann, and Heyse among modern German writers. French and German drama and history lie but a step beyond. I, for one, have read more of these school editions of foreign classics since I left school than when they were part of school-day duty, and I am still grateful for the convenient notes and lists of hard words. As one with only an imperfect reading knowledge of foreign languages, I can testify with the right degree of authority to the pleasure of the ordinary person in reading unfamiliar tongues. If one has a fair grounding of Latin, the exploration of Italian and Spanish is a tour through a cleared and easy country. With Professor Norton’s wonderful prose translation and with the text of Dante in the _Temple Classics_, where the English version faces the Italian, page for page, one can read Dante as one would read Chaucer. And there could be no better way to learn the difference between prose and poetry than to turn now and again to Longfellow’s truly poetic translation and feel how his verse lifts in places to something that the prose cannot quite attain.