The present age as it gives colouring to educational practices is a matter-of-fact age. Whilst boasting of freedom of thought, it has fallen into a despotism of fact. Like the Old Man of the Sea, this reign of fact has been clutching at the neck of culture and railing at the play of fancy until there is but precious little of the "merrie" life left to look to. The men who cleared away the forest can be pardoned if they lived their lives largely in the light of stern fact, and so might the sons of these men; but those as many generations removed as the present should be able to drop back to the even tenor of a domestic and school life that recognizes the play of fanciful imagination as an essential part of the business of living at all. No sooner had the founders of our nation succeeded in giving men their long-coveted political freedom than science, cock-sure of being able to solve the riddle of existence, strode upon the scene and smote the favourite creatures of the imagination hip and thigh. It not only played havoc with the fairies of our fathers, but it came perilously near doing the same with their faith. And as a result, a material and utilitarian tone has taken hold of education in most places, and boys must be practical, scientific, and wear old heads on young shoulders. This same tendency had begun in the days of Charles Lamb, for he wrote the following protest to Coleridge: "Knowledge must now come to the child in the shape of knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit at his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal and Billy is better than a horse and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales which made the child a man while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there possibility of averting this sore evil? Think of what you would have been now if, instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history." And what must be said to supplanting the subject of fairy life by the anatomy and physiology of the human body? Is not a boy who knows the happy likeness of Old King Cole or Allan-a-Dale as well educated as he who recognizes the picture of an alcoholic liver? All this educational pother about having boys practical and trained to reason instead of being imaginative and romantic will die of its own accord some day, and then they may once more listen to merrie tales told under the greenwood tree.