It is hardly necessary to say that in this matter of taking up the vocabulary beforehand many teachers, perhaps even most teachers, will not agree with me. The other side of the question is very well put in a leaflet by Miss Mary E. Litchfield, published by the New England Association of Teachers in English: My pupils, I find, can work longer and harder on "Macbeth" and "Hamlet," with constantly increasing interest, than on any other masterpieces suited to school use. Just because these dramas are so stimulating, the pupils have the patience to struggle with the difficulties of the text. In general they feel only a languid interest in word-puzzles such as delight the student of language; for instance, the expression, "He doesn't know a hawk from a handsaw," might fail to arouse their curiosity. But when Hamlet says: "I am but mad north-north west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw," they are on the alert; they really care to know what he means and why he has used this peculiar expression. Thus word-study which might be mere drudgery is rendered interesting by the human element in the play—the element which, in my opinion, should always be kept well in the foreground. A large number of teachers, many of them, very likely, of experience greater than mine, will agree with this view. I am not able to do so because I believe we should know the language before we try to read; but I at least hold that the first principle in any successful teaching is that a teacher shall follow the method which he finds best adapted to his own temperament. For the instructor who is convinced that the habit of taking up difficulties of language as they are met in actual reading, to take them up then is perhaps the only effective way of doing things. It seems to me, however, a little like sacrificing the literature to a desire to make teaching the vocabulary easier. It is very likely a simpler way of arousing interest in difficulties of language; but in teaching literature the elucidation of obscure words and phrases is of interest or value simply for the sake of the effect of the text, and I hold that to this effect, and to this effect as a whole, everything else should be subordinate. Each teacher must decide for himself what is the proper method, but I insist that no author ever wrote sincerely without assuming that his vocabulary was familiar to his audience beforehand. Certainly I am not able to feel that it is wise to interrupt any first reading with anything save perhaps the briefest possible explanations, comments that are so short as not to break the flow of the work as a whole.