poetry, and of course even in these days, when a literary atmosphere in the home is unhappily so rare, an occasional student appears from time to time who has been taught to care for poetry where every child should learn to love it, in the nursery. On the whole, however, the average school-boy really cares little or nothing for literature, and in his secret heart is entirely convinced that nobody else cares either. Not knowing how to "study" literature, then, and feeling that in literature is nothing to study which is of consequence, the pupil is in no position to make even a reasonable beginning. He cannot even approach literature in any proper attitude unless he can be made to care for it; unless he can be so interested that he ceases to feel the profession of admiration for the Shakespeare he is asked to work upon to be necessarily cant and affectation. Perhaps the hardest part of the task set before the teacher is to bring the pupil into a frame of mind where he can properly study poetry and to give him some insight into what such study may and should mean. How this is to be accomplished I cannot pretend fully to say. In speaking of what I may call "inspirational" training in literature I shall try to answer the question to some extent; and here I may at least point out that the situation is from the first utterly hopeless if the teacher is in the same state of mind as the pupil. If the instructor is able to see no method of studying literature other than mechanical drudgery over form, the looking-up of words, verification of dates, dissection of plot, and so on, it is idle to hope that he will be able to aid the class to anything better than this dry-as-dust plodding. The teacher may at least learn what at its best the "study" is. He may or may not have the power of inciting those under him to enthusiasm, but he may at least show them that something is possible beyond the mechanical treatment of the masterpieces of art. A writer in the (Chicago) "Dial" states admirably the attitude of great masses of students in saying: