But this, you will say, is putting too big a demand upon the teacher. It is a demand which few of us are able to fulfil, but I am convinced myself that every teacher should keep such an ideal in view, and work toward it patiently. I have been studying _Hamlet_ off and on myself for ten years, I have been teaching it for four, and I am only just beginning to get some confidence about it now. I hope perhaps if I study it for ten years more to be able to teach it with some success. The great actor Salvini studied the part of Lear for eight years before he made any attempt to commit it to memory. Shakespeare is thus, in a sense, the most difficult of all authors to teach, for one can never exhaust him; in another sense he is the easiest, for even the poorest teacher cannot help making some effect with him. The latter fact, however, should not make us content with slovenly work. In this connection I may say that I am convinced that the greatest aid to success on the part of the teacher of English literature is painstaking and exact study for himself--not to be content with something that will do, but to absorb and reabsorb the spirit of the best works, and never to be satisfied that he knows them well enough. The number of works that he can know thus thoroughly will be limited at first, but their range will be constantly increasing; and therefore the work that he will be compelled to do in a more or less imperfect fashion will be constantly decreasing. As an example of how a single poem can be made sometimes to serve as an introduction to the whole of an author's work or to a large portion of it, let us take a very short and simple poem of Browning and see what can be made of it. Let me read to you _A Woman's Last Word_. Probably this poem, like many of Browning's, produces at the first reading only a vague and indefinite impression, a sort of groping sensation, in short, a wonder as to what it is all about. Let us analyse it. Whence did the difficulty arise? Evidently not from the language. It was from the fact that we did not know what went before; that from what is given us here, a mere scrap of experience, we had to construct the whole; and from the fact that we had to follow a sequence of thoughts suggested by circumstances unknown to us, instead of, as is usual in poetry, a series of actions or events which serve as a backbone or substructure for the thought. Herein lie the two main difficulties of appreciating that large class of Browning poetry known under the heading, _dramatic monologues_.