surely as the instinct for knowledge is set there, or the instinct for conduct. If the instinct for beauty is served by Greek literature and art as it is served by no other literature or art, we may trust to the instinct of self-preservation in humanity for keeping Greek as part of our culture." With the same great critic and thinker, I hope that in Canada "Greek will be increasingly studied as men feel the need in them for beauty, and how powerfully Greek art and Greek literature can serve this need." We are as respects the higher education of this country in that very period which Arnold saw ahead for America--"a period of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency"--a tendency to crowd into education too many matters; and it is for this reason I venture to hope that letters will not be allowed to yield entirely to the necessity for practical science, the importance of which I fully admit, while deprecating it being made the dominant principle in our universities. If we are to come down to the lower grades of our educational system I might also doubt whether despite all its decided advantages for the masses--its admirable machinery and apparatus, its comfortable school-houses, its varied systematic studies from form to form and year to year, its well managed normal and model schools, its excellent teachers--there are not also signs of superficiality. The tendency of the age is to become rich fast, to get as much knowledge as possible within a short time, and the consequence of this is to spread far too much knowledge over a limited ground--to give a child too many subjects, and to teach him a little of everything. These are days of many cyclopædias, historical summaries, scientific digests, reviews of reviews, French in a few lessons, and interest tables. All is digested and made easy to the student. Consequently not a little of the production of our schools and of some of our colleges may be compared to a veneer of knowledge, which easily wears off in the activities of life, and leaves the roughness of the original and cheaper material very perceptible. One may well believe that the largely mechanical system and materialistic tendency of our education has some effect in checking the development of a really original and imaginative literature among us. Much of our daily literature--indeed the chief literary aliment of large classes of our busy population is the newspaper press, which illustrates in many ways the haste and pressure of this life of ours in a country of practical needs like Canada. When we consider the despatch with which a large newspaper has to be made up, how reports are caught on the wing and published without sufficient verification, how editorials have to be written _currente calamo_, and often after midnight when important despatches come in, we may well wonder that the daily issue of a newspaper is so well done. With the development of confederation the leading Canadian papers