The rules of Rhetoric should be taught to adolescence; then when the boy goes to college he has tools with which to work. “When did you learn your letters?” I asked a six-year-old youngster yesterday. “I allus know’d ’em,” was the reply. And the answer was wise, for the kindergarten methods teach the child to read, and he never knows when or how he acquired the knowledge. As a healthy man does not know he has a stomach, so he should write without knowing a single so-called rule. And as the Froebel methods are fast making their way in all departments of learning, I expect this will soon be so. But the colleges lag behind, and Harvard (very busy fighting “Co-Ed—”) still tries to make statues by clapping the material on the outside. Professor Hill knows the futility of his methods, for in his last work he puts in several disclaimers to the effect that he “does not undertake to supply men with ideas.” That confession of weakness is pitiful. Professor Hill should surround his students with an atmosphere that makes thought possible. By liberating the imagination of his pupils ideas would come to them. But as fire will not burn without oxygen, so thought cannot exist in the presence of Mr. Barrett Wendell. Both he and his Superior are strong in way of supplying cold storage—that’s all. In lecturing on Literature and Oratory these men sit at a desk. And often, becoming weary, they sprawl over the table like a devil-fish seeking its prey. This, I believe, is the usual Cambridge method. But there is one exception to this rule at Harvard, and that is Professor Kittredge, who being nervous and cannot sit still, paces the platform and shoots the lecture over his shoulder. When a student is called on to recite, Professor Kittredge often opens a box of withering sarcasm that acts like chlorine gas on the poor fellow who is trying to recite. But it makes the rest of the class grin like deaths-heads. Harvard knows no general plan for cultivating the imagination, inciting animation, or furthering ambition. All is suppression, fear; and this repression often finds vent in rowdyism outside of Harvard Yard. The seven youths who under Professor Hill mark the themes hunt only for errors and lapses. The tendency of this negation is intellectual torpor and spiritual death. If any one should ask Mr. Barrett Wendell what he thought of the Herbartian idea of developing the God within, the Assistant Professor would first calmly light a cigarette, and after blowing the smoke through his nose, would fix on his presumptious interlocutor an Antarctic stare that would freeze him stiff. II.