My _third_ proposition (perhaps more discutable) has been that, the human soul's activities being separated, so far as we can separate them, into _What Does, What Knows, What Is_--to _be_ such-and-such a man ranks higher than either _knowing_ or _doing_ this, that, or the other: that it transcends all man's activity upon phenomena, even a Napoleon's: all his housed store of knowledge, though it be a Casaubon's or a Mark Pattison's: that only by learning to _be_ can we understand or reach, as we have an instinct to reach, to our right place in the scheme of things: and that, any way, all the greatest literature commands this instinct. To be Hamlet--to feel yourself Hamlet--is more important than killing a king or even knowing all there is to be known about a text. Now most of us have been Hamlet, more or less: while few of us, I trust, have ever murdered a monarch: and still fewer, perhaps, can hope to know all that is to be known of the text of the play. But for value, Gentlemen, let us not rank these three achievements by order of their rarity. Shakespeare means us to feel--to _be_--Hamlet. That is all: and from the play it is the best we can get. II Now in talking to you, last term, about children I had perforce to lay stress on the point that, with all this glut of literature, the mass of children in our commonwealth who leave school at fourteen go forth starving. But you are happier. You are happier, not in having your selection of reading in English done for you at school (for you have in the Public Schools scarce any such help): but happier (1) because the time of learning is so largely prolonged, and (2) because this most difficult office of sorting out from the mass what you should read as most profitable has been tentatively performed for you by us older men for your relief. For example, those of you-'if any,' as the Regulations say--who will, a week or two hence, be sitting for Section A of the Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos, have been spared, all along, the laborious business of choosing what you should read or read with particular attention for the good of your souls. Is Chaucer your author? Then you will have read (or ought to have read) "The Parlement of Fowls," the "Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, "The Knight's Tale," "The Man of Law's Tale," "The Nun Priest's Tale," "The Doctor's Tale," "The Pardoner's Tale" with its Prologue, "The Friar's Tale." You were not dissuaded from reading "Troilus;" you were not forbidden to read all the Canterbury Tales, even the naughtiest; but the works that I have mentioned have been 'prescribed' for you. So, of Shakespeare, we do not discourage you (at all events, intentionally) from reading "Macbeth," "Othello," "As You Like It," "The Tempest," any play you wish. In other years we 'set' each of these in its turn. But for this Year of Grace we insist upon "King John," "The Merchant of Venice," "King Henry IV, Part I," "Much Ado about Nothing," "Hamlet,"