successful they may be in real life, are, theoretically at least, at a discount. The Adamses, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Thoreau, were men who did violence in a good many ways to social usages, and we may admire their faults overmuch. To the teacher who stands in the presence of thirty or fifty distinct species of incipient men and women, social insight and culture, the ability to appreciate each in his individual traits, his strength or weakness, are a prime essential to good educative work. Now, there are two avenues through which social culture is attainable,--contact with men and women in the social environment which envelops us all, and literature. Literature is, first of all, a hundred-sided revelation of human conduct as springing from motive. Irving, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell are revealers of humanity. Still more so are Dickens and Eliot and Shakespeare and Goethe. To study these authors is not simply to enjoy the graphic power of an artist, but to look into the lives of so many varieties of men and women. They lay bare the heart and its inward promptings. Our appreciation for many forms of life under widely differing conditions is awakened. We come in touch with those typical varieties of men and women whom we shall daily meet if we will but notice. It broadens one's perceptions and sympathies, it reveals the many-sidedness of human life. It suggests to a teacher that the forty varieties of humanity in her schoolroom are not after one pattern, nor to be manipulated according to a single device. The social life that surrounds each one of us is small and limited. Our intimate companionships are few, and we can see deeply into the inner life of but a small portion even of those about us. The deeper life of thought and feeling is largely covered up with conventionalities and externalities. But in the works of the best novelists, dramatists, and poets, we may look abroad into the whole world of time and place, upon an infinite variety of social conditions, and we are permitted to see directly into the inner thought and motive, the very soul of the actors. Yet fidelity to human nature and real life is claimed to be the peculiar merit of these great writers. By the common consent of critics, Shakespeare is the prince of character delineators. Schlegel says of him:-- "Shakespeare's knowledge of mankind has become proverbial; in this his superiority is so great that he has justly been called the master of the human heart. A readiness to remark the mind's fainter and involuntary utterances, and the power to express with certainty the meaning of these signs, as determined by experience and reflection, constitute 'the observer of men.'"