It is essential to consider how far this prophecy has been realised, for it penetrates the very heart of our problem; it suggests the entire lack of a central emphasis which characterises even the literary education of our day. American education might very well be said to be passing through a period of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency, but by no manner of means might it be said that in American education letters had obtained or regained their leading place. Although the colleges swarm with students of literature, the greater part of these students have a more accurate knowledge of the problems of the natural sciences or of economics than they have of the problems and methods of literary study. As a plain matter of fact, a great many undergraduates choose to specialise in literature, and particularly in English literature, because they believe it a study easier than any other. And through a smattering of all the ologies which has been their education from early childhood, they interpret and condemn great masterpieces of which they have never learned the true significance, since they have never confronted soberly the old traditions that illuminate and sustain those masterpieces. It is largely because our education deals seriously with almost every subject except literature, that literature has lost its leading place; and it is because literature has lost its leading place that education has lost much of its inspiring power, and our contemporary literary innovators are characterised to such a degree by fear and hopelessness. It is not unnatural, however, that popular opinion, which to-day influences even the teaching of literature, should consider scientific education so important, for the public sees its leaders in every field profoundly influenced by science. The leader of our political organisation, like most of our leaders, happens to be a scientist; most of our philosophers are scientists, and our magazines deal monthly with the concessions that our religious leaders are making to the new implications of science. It is not unnatural that science should be popularly considered an important study and the study of literature the recreation of an idle day. And it follows just as naturally that swarms of undergraduate students should have imposed upon the teaching of literature much of the dilettantism which this popular view suggests is inherent in it. The typical student of literature--of English literature, for example--may be known by four characteristics,--a fear of Spenser, a dislike of Milton, a hatred of Wordsworth, and a suppressed desire to write a musical comedy. This is the type of student that must be taught, and it easily follows that the teaching of him should come to lack the thoroughness and exactness, the desire to master ancillary subjects, and the common background, which I have enumerated above as having once been the ideals of literary study.