out on his mission of outspokenness. In order to keep the problems of modern life before my form I strew my classroom with daily and weekly papers, monthly and quarterly reviews, and demand précis of all the more important articles before or after debates on all sorts of modern problems. I have started to do more original work myself. The _World of School_ has accepted two or three articles on educational reform which I submitted to them, and I now have the lust of authorship on me badly. It's a very wearing disease. I am for ever planning books. I want to write a complete English course, eliminating all that nonsense about weak and strong verbs, different uses of the gerund and all grammar grind and analysis. What I want is an historical survey of the whole of English literature, liberally interspersed with examples, with a list of the books they ought to buy and enjoy reading, imaginative questions which should spur them on to original composition in verse and prose with a stimulating introduction on why, how, and what we should read. I would make such books as Arnold Bennett's "Literary Taste" and "The Author's Craft" compulsory for every boy in every school in the kingdom. I would also make every boy learn by heart those passages in "Sesame and Lilies" where Ruskin points out the value of reading in practical life. But all this would not gain a boy many marks in a modern examination, and we live or die by results in examinations. English papers seem to me to be the worst set of all. What can it profit a man to know the context of obscure passages in Shakespeare if he has not got the spirit of the play in him actively shaping his own life? If a boy does not feel the Hamlet or the Richard II within him shouting for utterance when he reads a Shakespeare play, he is doing himself no good at all. The whole argument brings one back to beauty and imagination. I want to see every boy's study crammed with copies of the "World's Classics," the "Everyman" and the "Home University Library." There is no excuse for anybody not having read standard works at this time of day. I try to instil a love of books into my forms by telling them of men like George Gissing, with whom it became a question of breakfast or a precious volume acquired in a second-hand shop: a book must cost you something before you can expect really to value it at its true worth. As Ruskin says, we despise books simply because they are accessible. I've always had this book-fever on me. I remember even as a small boy suffering unduly from the pangs of hunger, going from fruiterer to book-shop and from book-shop to fruiterer, wondering which I really wanted more, the romance or the pound of cherries. I know that I always hated myself when I succumbed to the latter temptation, for the cherries were soon eaten but the delights of the book were perennial. _July 4, 1911_