For a last word on the matter of training students in the appreciation of literary form and workmanship I should offer a warning against attempting too much. Something is certainly unavoidable, but of minutiæ it is well to exercise what Burke calls "a wise and salutary neglect." Literary language must be learned or all intelligent work is utterly impossible; since form is an important element in all artistic language, it is not possible to ignore this. The extent to which work can and should go in the study of form in a given class is one of the matters which the instructor has to decide; and when he has decided it he must resolutely refuse to allow himself to be unhappy because in the great realm of literature are so many noble tracts of which he has not even hinted to his class the existence. If he has done the lesser work well he has at least put his students in a condition to do the greater for themselves; if he had attempted more he might have accomplished nothing. FOOTNOTES: [212:1] Page 36. XVI LITERARY BIOGRAPHY How far the biography of authors shall be a part of the school-work is a question which deserves attention. I began these talks by calling attention to the fact that it is so much easier to teach details about the life of a writer than it is to train the youthful mind to a true appreciation of literature itself. Teachers naturally and almost unconsciously fall into the habit of over-emphasizing this division of the history of literature, and questions about the lives of authors are dangerously easy to formulate for recitation or for examination-paper. Nothing, however, should be allowed to obscure the idea that the work and not the worker is the thing with which study should be concerned; and everybody would agree that in theory the limit to biographical inquiry in secondary-school study is the extent to which a knowledge of an author's career or personality aids to the understanding of what he has written. To say this, however, is much like restating the question. Like a good deal that passes for argument, it only puts the problem in other words; for we are at once confronted with the doubt how far a pupil in the secondary school is likely to be helped by knowing about the facts of a writer's life. At the beginning of the "Spectator" Addison remarks: I have observed that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure, till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author.