dog, an asterisk would not hold him to a foot-note occupying a page and giving all that science knows about that interesting animal. This is precisely the privilege that your modern critic will not allow. He will have his explanations, his margins, “build you a bridge over a rain-drop, put ladders up a pebble, and encompass you on every side with ingenious alpen-stocks and climbing irons, yet when perchance you stumble and hold out a hand for help, behold! he is never there to grasp it.” What does a boy, plunging into Scott or Byron, want with these atrocities? The imagery that peoples his mind, the music that sweeps through his soul, these, and not your stilted erudition, are the milk and honey of boyhood. “I once knew a boy,” says Miss Repplier, in that sparkling defense, ‘Oppression of Notes,’ “who so delighted in Byron’s description of the dying gladiator that he made me read it to him over and over again. He did not know—and I never told him—what a gladiator was. He did not know that it was a statue, and not a real man described. He had not the faintest notion of what was meant by the Danube, or the Dacian mother or a Roman holiday; historically and geographically, the boy’s mind was a happy blank. There was nothing intelligent, only a blissful stirring of the heartstrings by reason of strong words and swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping thoughts.” Had the reader stopped the course of the swinging verse to explain these unknown words, boyish happiness would have flown, oppression become complete, and let us hope sleep would have rescued the bored boy from such an ordeal.