Not only is Professor Hill’s formula rank error, but it is in direct opposition to truth. I bundle his crass creed with Dr. Hall’s Universal Self-Treatment, Professor Loisette’s Scheme of Mnemonics, and the Brown-Sequard Recipe for Perpetual Youth. Professor Hill, with the help of his students, has compiled three books on Rhetoric; Mr. Barrett Wendell has published two. Students at Harvard are expected to buy these books. There are three thousand students at Harvard. These various books are practically one, for they all teach that “a parenthetical remark must be enclosed in parentheses, dashes or commas,” and that “every sentence should have at least one verb.” These things are explained to men who have had ten years of solid schooling in order to fit them for College. Professor Hill recommends Harvard students to buy “that well written work on Composition by Mr. Barrett Wendell,” and Mr. Wendell modestly says, on page 8, line 18, of his biggest well written work: “Professor Hill’s books are the most sensible treatment of the art of composition that I have yet found in print.” The last three chapters in Mr. Wendell’s well written work bear the following startling titles, respectively: _Clearness_, _Force_, and _Elegance_. Harvard Freshmen know Trigonometry, Physics and “one language beside English,” and various other things, but it is left for Professor Hill to sell them a book which explains that “a sentence may end either with a period, interrogation point or an exclamation mark!” Do you say that the public school system is to blame for such a condition? My answer is that if Harvard required her students to know the simple rules of Rhetoric before being admitted to the University, it would be done. Mr. Hill fills the Boylston Professorship of Literature and Oratory at Harvard University, but with all the many thousand students who have been under his care he has probably never given impulse to a single orator, nor materially assisted one man with literary ambition. The reason is that he is teaching things that should have been known to his pupils years before. There is a time to teach things as well as a way. Instead of arousing animation Professor Hill reduces it. So sympathy is made a weakling and imagination rendered wingless. I have examined many compositions written by Harvard students, and they average up about like the epistles of little girls who write letters to Santa Claus. The students are all right—fine intelligent young fellows—but the conditions under which they work are such that they are robbed of all spontaneity when they attempt to express themselves. Of course I know that a few Harvard men have succeeded in Oratory and Literature, for there are those so strong that even Cambridge cannot kill their personality, nor a Professor reduce to neutral salts their native vim.