detail the rarer peculiarities of the Homeric dialect. Such things may well be deferred until, later in the course, the study of Homer (of the “Iliad”) is resumed. The teacher who is afraid of the difficulties connected with the plan presented should remind himself of the fact that progress by any other path is equally beset with difficulties. While at work on Homer, care should be taken to keep pupils from being influenced simultaneously by such tales as those from the Arabian Nights, because they blunt the sense of the wonderful. [41] These reasons apply in no way to the “Iliad,” but only to the “Odyssey.” Moreover, it is presupposed that religious feeling has been sufficiently awakened long beforehand. In that case the mythical elements can do no harm whatever, for, in so far as they are inconsistent with religious feeling, their effect is decidedly repellent, and renders an excess of illusion impossible. 284. Only two poets, two historians, and two philosophers need to be mentioned to indicate the continuation of the course. Homer and Virgil; Herodotus and Cæsar; Plato and Cicero. What authors should precede these, or should intervene, or follow, may be left for circumstances to determine. Xenophon, Livy, Euripides, Sophocles, and Horace will probably always retain a place by the side of those mentioned; Horace especially offers brief maxims, the after-effect of which the educator should by no means underestimate. It is obvious that Virgil and Herodotus are rendered much easier by taking up Homer first; on the other hand, the return to Homer (to the “Iliad”) during adolescence, is as little to be omitted, if only on account of mythology, as the return to ancient history for purposes of pragmatic study (250). Again, the syntactical scheme of the ancient languages, which involves far greater difficulties than do even inflections and vocabulary, is more easily mastered by placing the poets before the prose-writers, because then the pupils are not compelled to struggle with all the difficulties of sentence structure at once. At any rate, it is desirable that, just as the student’s Greek vocabulary is built up from the “Odyssey,” his hoard of Latin words should be drawn from the “Æneid.” The latter, however, will hardly be read entirely, because it cannot be gone over with nearly the same rapidity as the latter books of the “Odyssey,” when facility in reading has been attained. Cæsar’s “Bellum Gallicum” must be studied with exceptional carefulness, since its style comes nearer to being a desirable first model for the student of Latin than the style of the other authors in use. After this has been accomplished, the strictly systematic teaching and memorizing of Latin syntax, together with selected brief examples, is in order as one of the main lines of work. In Plato several books of the “Republic,” especially the first, second, fourth, and eighth, constitute a desirable goal. That Cicero should be revealed to young minds on his