My purpose is not to tickle your ears with a panegyric on what Mississippi has done in the field of literature, not to apologize for her confessed shortcomings, not to prophesy excellence as the certain outcome of the future. My purpose is a humbler one. I take for granted that there are in the state young men with literary aspirations. I wish to suggest to such, some lines of work that need to be done, and to be done at once. It is my hope that such work will be valuable in furnishing a store house of literary material and that the labor of accumulation will be admirable discipline preparing the students for creative effort--if haply they be so endowed as to be able to do work for all time. To make my suggestions altogether practical, I shall draw up a list of channels in which the student of Mississippi literature may profitably direct his activity. (It may not be amiss just here to call your attention to the fact that by my subject-title I am restricted to that aspect of our subject which has to do with the interests of the students and have, therefore, no direct connection with the immediate interests of the author.) Turning our attention to student-work, I may as well express my opinion that we have no noble specimens of literary art to which the student may turn to make critical examination of the method and purposes of literary interpretation. We have little that may claim place even in the ranks of third and fourth rate productions. With the single exception of the poems of Irvin Russell, Mississippi has produced nothing which literary men have been willing to accord a place in the literature of America. It is perhaps too soon to prophesy whether his place is a permanent one or not. It is, however, evident that the Mississippi student must look for a humbler class of work than that of constructive criticism. Having little material to which the rules of esthetic criticism may be profitably applied, and having no desire to be enrolled in the large and ignoble army of criticasters, our student must look for a less inviting field of activity. Yet he has the consolation of knowing that even journeyman work if it be well done is altogether worth doing. And even if we are not yet at a stage in our literary history when we can afford to claim the right to subject our material to the tests reserved for noble literary models, we may wisely believe that ours is the work which will prepare the ground from which will spring up a harvest every way worthy of our beautiful fields of our eventful history, of our noble people.