One way of preparing a class for the work which is now to be done is to speak to them of literature as a sort of high kind of algebra; to let them see, that is, how the distinction between the great mass of reading-matter and what is fairly to be called literature is not unlike the difference with which they are familiar in mathematics between arithmetic and the higher grade of work which comes after. The newspaper, the text-book, the history, the scientific treatise all deal with the concrete, just as arithmetic has to do with absolute quantities. In the mental development of the pupil the time comes when he is considered sufficiently advanced to go on from the handling of concrete things to the dealing with the abstract. When he is able to understand the relation between the sum paid for one bushel of wheat and the amount needed to purchase fifty, he may be advanced to the lore of general formulæ, and be made to understand how _x_ may represent any price and _y_ any number of bushels. In the same way from reading in a newspaper the story of the assassination of the late King of Servia, the concrete case, he may go on to read "Macbeth," wherein Duncan represents any monarch of given character, and Macbeth not a particular, actual, concrete assassin, but a murderer of a sort, a type, the general or abstract character. The student has gone on from the particular to the general; from the concrete to the abstract; from the arithmetic of human nature to its algebra. A similar comparison between history and poetry is on the same grounds easily to be made between the history lesson and the chronicle plays of Shakespeare. The student who in his nursery days started out with the instinctive question in regard to the fairy-tale: "Is it true?" begins to perceive the difference between literal and essential truth. He perceives that verity in literature is not simple and obvious fidelity to the specific fact or event; he learns to appreciate that the truth of art, like the truth of algebra, lies in its accuracy in representing truth in the abstract: he comes to appreciate the narrowness of the nursery question, which asked only for the literal fact, and he begins to comprehend something of the symbolic. An excellent illustration for practical use is a poem like "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." Any live, wholesome boy is sure to tingle with the swing and fervor of the verse, the sense of the open air, the excitement, the doubt, the hope, the joyful climax. It is easy to lead the class on to consider how exhilarating such an experience would be, and to go on from this to point out that the poem does not describe a literal, actual occurrence; but that it is a generalized expression of the zest and exhilaration of a superb, all but impossible ride, with the added excitement of being responsible for the freedom or even the lives of the folk of a whole city.