Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as beautiful as the make of it. I have held him in admiration and affection so many years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now; but his heart isn’t, nor his pen; and years do not count. Let him have plenty of them; there is profit in them for us. ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT In the appendix to Croker’s Boswell’s Johnson one finds this anecdote: _Cato’s Soliloquy_.—One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat to him (Dr. Samuel Johnson) Cato’s Soliloquy, which she went through very correctly. The Doctor, after a pause, asked the child: “What was to bring Cato to an end?” She said it was a knife. “No, my dear, it was not so.” “My aunt Polly said it was a knife.” “Why, Aunt Polly’s knife _may do_, but it was a _dagger_, my dear.” He then asked her the meaning of “bane and antidote,” which she was unable to give. Mrs. Gastrel said: “You cannot expect so young a child to know the meaning of such words.” He then said: “My dear, how many pence are there in _sixpence_?” “I cannot tell, sir,” was the half-terrified reply. On this, addressing himself to Mrs. Gastrel, he said: “Now, my dear lady, can anything be more ridiculous than to teach a child Cato’s Soliloquy, who does not know how many pence there are in sixpence?” In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society Professor Ravenstein quoted the following list of frantic questions, and said that they had been asked in an examination: Mention all the names of places in the world derived from Julius Caesar or Augustus Caesar. Where are the following rivers: Pisuerga, Sakaria, Guadalete, Jalon, Mulde? All you know of the following: Machacha, Pilmo, Schebulos, Crivoscia, Basecs, Mancikert, Taxhem, Citeaux, Meloria, Zutphen. The highest peaks of the Karakorum range. The number of universities in Prussia. Why are the tops of mountains continually covered with snow (sic)? Name the length and breadth of the streams of lava which issued from the Skaptar Jokul in the eruption of 1783. That list would oversize nearly anybody’s geographical knowledge. Isn’t it reasonably possible that in our schools many of the questions in all studies are several miles ahead of where the pupil is?—that he is set to struggle with things that are ludicrously beyond his present reach, hopelessly beyond his present strength? This remark in passing, and by way of text; now I come to what I was going to say.