Today we have literature in one class and composition in another and perhaps rhetoric in another. Departments are the offspring of universities and the instruments of science. The rational school of literary expression correlates author, precept and exercise. Information may be imparted piecemeal and from different sources; it is multitudinous and capable of division. Formation is one and united; it is the faculty or power brought to the perfection of self-expression. Art requires a teacher and unifying of means; science may have a score of lecturers as its truths are found in a score of books. Let the teacher of literature therefore take standard literature, make it understood, feel its personality that students may feel it, note and appreciate its beauty that others may take fire or at least get heat from the enthusiasm kindled within him, and then let the teacher see to it that his class express their own selves as the author expressed himself. Let students do for Lincoln what Shakespeare did for Julius Cæsar. If they cannot do a play, perhaps they can do an act; if they cannot create a character, perhaps they can give one characteristic action; if they cannot write a description or tell a story, perhaps they can supply a noun for Lincoln or visualize his deeds in a verb or paint him in an epithet or coin him in a metaphor. And all this, not for an Elizabethan public, but for the students’ own public here and now, looking forward, not backward. Desperate efforts have been made to galvanize literary courses by lectures on modern novels, current magazines and daily papers. The lamentable fact is that most recent products are not literature; that if there is in them art, it has not been made available for students, as the art of literary classics has been made available by centuries of criticism, and that, finally, the contents of contemporary writings are so easy of access and so inviting to the reader and yet often so ephemeral, that the artistic form is neglected. There is no contemporary history, neither is there contemporary criticism. Literature, like all art, must pass beyond the prejudices and passions of the day to be known and appreciated as art at all. It is for the enlightened teacher of literature to make the students embody their own experience in the finest art molds of the past, not distracting them by the multiplicity of modern literature, but holding up the ideals, like torches, to light the paths before them and, like expert guides, to direct the trembling steps of beginners to new goals.