Some of the books at present included in the college entrance requirement, it must be added, lend themselves too much to unintelligent pedantry. Undoubtedly much thought has been given to the selection, although perhaps less sympathetic consideration of child nature. The result is not in all cases satisfactory. To foster a taste for poetry a teacher may, it is true, do much with "Julius Cæsar," but I have yet to see the class of undergraduates with which I should personally hope to arouse enthusiasm with "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Lycidas," or "Comus." I may be simply confessing my own limitations, but I should think all of these poems, magnificent in themselves, hardly fitted for the boys and girls who are found in our public schools. I have extracted from more than one teacher a confession of entire inability to take pleasure in the Milton which they assure their pupils is beautiful; and while this is an arraignment of instructors rather than of the works, it is significant of the attitude the honest minds of children are likely to take. By way of making things worse, scholars are drilled in Macaulay's "Milton."[35:1] The inclusion of this essay, the product of the author's 'prentice hand, is most lamentable. The philistinism of Macaulay is here rampant; and the one thing which students are sure to get from the essay is the conception that poetry is the product of barbarism, to be outgrown and cast aside when civilization is sufficiently advanced. Again and again in entrance examinations and in second-year notebooks, I have found this idea expressed. It is not only the one thing which survives out of the essay, but is often the one conviction in regard to literature which has survived examinations as the result of the study of the entire entrance requirement. In the entrance paper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for last year (1905), I had put a question in regard to the difference between poetry and prose. From the replies I have taken a few of the many echoes from the study of the "Milton." Macaulay claims that the uncivilized alone care for poetry. I agree with Macaulay that prose is the product of civilization, . . . while poetry was the way the ancients expressed themselves. Poetry is not being written nearly so much now as in the Dark Ages, simply because men are learning to treat subjects in classes. Macaulay says that the writer of a great poem must have a certain unsoundness of mind, and Carlyle makes the statement that to be a great poet a man must first be as a little child. If these opinions are just, one would think poetry could not be regarded as of a quality equal to prose works. Poetry came first in the lapse of time, and as people grew more civilized, as their education grew higher, they wrote in prose.