I have just finished reading “A Centurion of the Thirtieth,” “On the Great Wall,” and “The Winged Hats”--all from Kipling’s “Puck of Pook’s Hill” and I now feel in the proper frame of mind to begin the year’s work in English History. By the proper frame of mind I mean that what I know, and what I would fain have my class know, is illuminated and enlivened by a sense of reality without which my teaching and their learning would be as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. The fundamental importance of beginning with this “proper frame of mind” is the first matter which I wish to emphasize, the starting point of the many matters which we may profitably consider together in our monthly discussions. For ponder the magnitude of the task before us, as we return from our vacation in this very modern world of ours to our very modern pupils. How shall we be true interpreters of the life of an early day, so remote, so utterly removed, so unreal, unless we can by some magic touch invest it all with reality? It is a solemn thing, fellow workmen in this noble field of English history, to think how many thousands of us shall endeavor, during the next few weeks, to impart some knowledge, some realizing sense of prehistoric man’s dwelling in the so different Albion which was the mother of England; of Celt and Roman and Saxon and Dane; of imperial Cæsar landing on the unknown barbarous coast of Britain; of Druids and of monks; and so on through those long, mysterious thousand years which bring us to a somewhat clearer day (though still remote enough for every exercise of the imagination!), when the great Duke became the last conqueror of the little island. A solemn thing, I say, for if we fail to illumine this mass of material with any ray of the imagination, if we merely cram facts and theories into the miserable minds of our victims until they are stuffed with names and dates, then are we become blind leaders of the blind of whom it may be said, as I once heard it said of a professor in one of our great colleges, “Think of the hundreds for whom he has _ruined_ history.”