one child must miss some stage, some explanation that will involve a weakness, a lameness for the rest of the course of instruction. Not only is the actual music-lesson a nuisance in this way, but all day the school air is loaded with the oppressive tinkling of racked and rackety pianos. Nothing, I think, could be more indicative of the real value the English school-proprietor sets on school-teaching than this easy admission of the music-master to hack and riddle the curriculum into rags. [Footnote 1: Piano playing as an accomplishment is a nuisance and encumbrance to the school course and a specialization that surely lies within the private Home province. To learn to play the piano properly demands such an amount of time and toil that I do not see how we can possibly include it in the educational scheme of the honourable citizens of the coming world state. To half learn it, to half learn anything, is a training in failure. But it is probable that a different sort of music teaching altogether--a teaching that would aim, not at instrumentalization, but at intelligent appreciation--might find a place in a complete educational scheme. The general ignorance that pervades, and in part inspires these papers, does, in the matter of music, become special, profound, and distinguished. It seems to me, however, that what the cultivated man or woman requires is the ability to read a score intelligently rather than to play it--to distinguish the threads, the values, of a musical composition, to have a quickened ear rather than a disciplined hand. I owe to my friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, the suggestion that the piano is altogether too exacting an instrument to use as the practical vehicle for such instruction, and that something simpler and cheaper--after the fashion of the old spinet--is required. Possibly some day a teacher of genius will devise and embody in a book a course of class lessons, sustained by simple practice and written work, that would attain this end. But, indeed, after all is said and done, music is the most detached and the purest of arts, the most accessory of attainments.] Apart from the piano work, the special teaching of elegant accomplishments seems just at present on the wane. And on the whole I think what one might call useful or catchpenny accomplishments are also passing their zenith--shorthand lessons, book-keeping lessons, and such-like impostures upon parental credulity.