her acquaintance, had tried to become friends with her, and then, for some inscrutable reason, had drawn coldly away. By dint of working twice as hard as May, Ida had managed to outstrip her, and to begin the Junior year as the first of the class; but all the while she was conscious that her success was due to labour, and not to a larger intelligence. And with the coming of the new professor of Greek, this superiority, her one consolation, was called in question. Professor Roberts had brought about a revolution in the University. He was young and passionately devoted to his work; had won his Doctor's degree at Berlin _summa cum laude_, and his pupils soon felt that he represented a standard of knowledge higher than they had hitherto imagined as attainable, and yet one which, he insisted, was common in the older civilization of Europe. It was this nettling comparison, enforced by his mastery of difficulties, which first aroused the ardour of his scholars. In less than a year they passed from the level of youths in a high school to that of University students. On the best heads his influence was magical. His learning and enthusiasm quickened their reverence for scholarship, but it was his critical faculty which opened to them the world of art, and nerved them to emulation. “Until one realizes the shortcomings of a master,” he said in a lecture, “it is impossible to understand him or to take the beauty of his works to heart When Sophocles repeats himself--the Electra is but a feeble study for the Antigone, or possibly a feeble copy of it--we get near the man; the limitations of his outlook are characteristic: when he deforms his Ajax with a tag of political partisanship, his servitude to surroundings defines his conscience as an artist; and when painting by contrasts he poses the weak Ismene and Chrysothemis as foils to their heroic sisters, we see that his dramatic power in the essential was rudimentary. Yet Mr. Matthew Arnold, a living English poet, writes that Sophocles 'saw life steadily and saw it whole.' This is true of no man, not of Shakespeare nor of Goethe, much less of Sophocles or Racine. The phrase itself is as offensively out of date as the First Commandment.” The bold, incisive criticism had a singular fascination for his hearers, who were too young to remark in it the crudeness that usually attaches to originality.