This cry for the practical has laid a curse on the culture of many a boy. He has been educated for the eight or ten hours that he works for his board and keep, and the rest of his waking day finds him ill at ease in a field of study or an appreciation of the better things of life. Not being able to "speak Greek" or to talk with men who do speak Greek, he naturally turns to the spectacular, the ornate, the frivolous. Nothing of an order above the broadly burlesque or the melodramatic will hold his interest and attention. The theatre of Dionysus is too severely classical in the beauty with which it represents life in action, and he never learns to sit out a pure tragedy, hear "sweetest Shakespeare warble his native wood-notes wild," or dilate on the right emotions, if "Jonson's learnéd sock be on." The boy's talents are in all probability not at fault. They are merely dressed in the prevailing fashion. This fashion is set by a standard of what is useful for material success in life. The subject-matter of education must be scientific facts, and with these facts the boy must be taught to reason. The uselessness of imagination and memory as mental powers is held up to him. It is not for him to enrich his mind by what an active and retentive memory can give him of classic literature. In fact, the memory is looked upon, by the "scientific gent" (as Thackeray labelled him) in his laboratory, as a minor concern and left to work out its own salvation--if it really needs to be saved. And as for the memory being used to chronicle the exploits of mythical heroes in an age of superstition, that would be unthinkable in the day of scientific research. Let not the boy then be held up to blame if he is no more able to name the Olympian council than was Tom Sawyer to name the first two disciples chosen. The fault is with the system, the rational scientific system.