rich treasures of the present with the barren empiricism of the past, and that, too, of the not distant past. The opponents of grammar must be silent over this volume; here is the brevity for which they have been clamoring, and here is scholarship by which most of them may profit. Still the book will require a teacher, and one who understands his business. In some hands it might share the fate which Latham's abridgment met twenty years ago, when it gained admission to some of our high schools, and was so mercilessly kicked out-of-doors. It is not suited to the Gradgrind method of instruction, nor does it give in a bit to the prejudices of those who have such a horror of a declension or a paradigm. The glossary with which the book closes is an admirable feature of the work. It is scholarly, but not scholastic nor pedantic. It is wisely but not painfully etymological. It explains every word in the extracts, and points out their nearest affinities. It is' thus well calculated to form in the mind of a boy or girl the habit of etymological inquiry. It will be noticed that the volume is prepared for the lower forms of classical schools; and that it comes to us with the great sanction of the Clarendon Press. It shows that a change is taking place in the classical culture of England, and that the claims of our dear mother English to classical society are becoming fully recognized.

We congratulate our alma mater upon her admission to good society, and that she has no longer occasion to blush for her Teutonic genealogy. We hope that some schools in this country, who have long prided themselves upon their Pharisaic adherence to the old classical trivium, Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, may learn that the educational as well as the material world is moving; and, unless they wish to become absolutely ridiculous,it is high time for them to indicate by their curricula that God's plan in creation was not quite completed when the Iliad was written nor when Cicero had spoken. The world is rapidly falling into the heresy that Columbus was a greater man than Jason; that Capt. Ericsson, with one of his monitors, would be more than a match for the Argo, Hercules and all; and that in an open field and fair fight, Achilles himself, with all his divine panoply, might have shared the fate of Hector in a combat with a first-class locomotive driven by a greasy mechanic. We

intend no fling at true classical training; we love it, defend it, and advocate it. And just in proportion to our love and advocacy of it, do we abhor that bigotry which claims that on the basis of Latin and Greek alone a boy or a girl can now be properly educated. We have in mind in writing these lines certain catalogues which make their annual rounds to the public, soliciting patronage of Christian communities on the ground that they adhere strictly to a basis of pure paganism, with the exception of morning and evening prayers. It is true that in most of these schools they have what is called an English department, a kind of smallpox hospital, where the vulgar, idiotic, and feeble-minded are kept apart from those who are initiated into the sublime mysteries of Hellenic and Roman lore. We have in mind also certain religious people who meet in conclave and synod on republican soil, and, with all apparent honesty and devotion, anathematize the papacy, and warn their confiding hearers against Catholic schools, and then proceed to devise means by which they can beg money to endow sectarian schools, to be controlled, not indeed by the great Roman pontiff, but by an indefinite number of small American pontiffs. We are reminded of this latter class because they profess great classical zeal. Classical study is the Ephesian Diana in whose name the interests of their crafts are advocated. What is classical culture? All that is good and great and pure, is classic. Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, are classical. The modern power-loom tended by a beautiful and intelligent factory girl is more classic than those of Helen and Andromache; and the son of Peleus, were he to appear among us, would throw aside spear and buckler for a first rate breechloader or revolver.

But we need both the ancient and the modern classics.

Continue, gentlemen, to enjoy your worship of the ancients, but fail not to purge it of its narrowness. Read your Demosthenes in your right hand if you please, but keep your Burke or your Webster in your left. Admire

"The mossy fountains and the sylvan shades,

The dreams of Pindus and the Aonian maids,"

but rise above the Aonian mount with him who passed the flamin bounds of space and time, the living throne, and the sapphire blaze. Linger in the olive groves of Academa; peruse and reperuse the story of the war against Troy, and of the seven against Thebes; but admit into the new dispensation of your classical canon the story of a holier war waged against the town of Mansoul; listen to the song of the sirens with the hero of Ithaca, but keep clear of their enchantment; refresh yourself in the gardens of Alcinous and of the Hesperides, but don't neglect the Wicket Gate, the Hill Difficulty, the Delectable Mountains, and the Celestial City; amuse yourself with the Cyclops, but look out for Apollyon and Doubting Castle (they are in high feather just now). Settle as you please the quarrel between the

"Seven cities who begged for Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begged his bread,"

but be sure that it was in Bedford jail in England where the immortal dreamer* labored and suffered and all but starved, while his genius marked the road which guides the progress of our souls to God.

We have alluded to another book as kindred in spirit and purpose to the one which we have noticed at greater length than we intended. It is entitled, "English of the XIVth Century. Illustrated by Notes Grammatical and Philological on Chaucer's Prologue and Knight's Tale, by Stephen H. Carpenter, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the State University of Wisconsin." We have in this volume a life of Chaucer, a brief grammatical introduction, the text of the Prologue and Knight's Tale, followed by copious and critical notes, and the whole concluded by a glossarial index. The book is most admirably edited

We love Thomas Arnold all the better for his intense admiration of John Bunyan. In speaking of the old English divines, he says, "I wish I could sympathize with what you say of then. I quite agree as to their language; it is delightful to my taste, but I cannot find in 1y of them a really great man i As it is, I hold John Bunyan to have been a man of incomparably greater genius than any of them, and to have given a far truer and more edifying picture of Christianity. His Pilgrim's Progress seems to be a complete reflection of Scripture, with none of the rubbish of the theologians mixed up with it. I think that Milton in hi 'Reformation in England,' or in one of his tracts, I forget which, treats the Church writers of his time, and their show of learning, utterly uncritical as it was, with the feeling which it deserved."

and printed, and no ordinary gratitude is due to Prof. Carpenter for removing the only obstacle that has hitherto existed to the study of the father of English poetry in our high schools. It is not merely for the sake of Chaucer that we commend this book, though he is worthy a tenfold perusal for his own intrinsic merit. The language in which he wrote, and the time at which he wrote, greatly enhance his claims upon our notice. It was at a time. most favorable for us to look back upon the earlier and earliest forms of the language then rapidly assuming their modern dress, and find in them the originals of what have been regarded as anomalies and enigmas in the English of the nineteenth century. The antique diction of Chaucer, which has made him uninteresting to many young minds, with the aids afforded by Prof. Carpenter, not only ceases to be repulsive, but becomes actually pleasing. We sincerely hope that this volume will soon find its way into our public high and normal schools. Two honest hours given to this book through an entire normal school course would soon give an entirely different tone to the study of the English language in all our schools. It will require a teacher who believes in it, and one who is not continually snarling and grumbling about the uselessness of English grammar. To one who loves his mother-tongue, with all its garnered stores of wisdom and beauty, to one who is in some measure conscious of the divine mysteries of language, and has found the high pleasure of tracing to their origin, as far as may be, the words of a language, and then seeing how the ages have worn their forms and sometimes almost inverted their meanings; who can find in a language, and the literature which it embodies, the history of the nation or nations which have spoken it, the character of their institutions, civil and domestic, the climate and physical features of the country which they inhabited; who can grasp the relations of the numerous tongues which the varied character and conditions of civilized life have called into existence, and who takes a pleasure in opening these bright visions to his pupils, this book will appear

"Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose,

But musical as is Apollo's lute,

And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets

Where no crude sur eit reigns."

In what we have said of the merits of these two volumes, we would not seem to forget that they are only representatives of a class of books, now becoming quite numerous, on the history and philology of the English tongue. In the Clarendon series alone, we count upon our shelves no less than fifteen volumes, all written in the spirit of the new philology, and covering four centuries of our literary history. How long will it be before acquaintance with some of these volumes shall be required for admission to every respectable American college? The boy who now enters Harvard College must carefully read his fifteen hundred and fifty-five lines of Homer, and he is advised to read something in English. Can a boy master all the varieties of form and idiom that occur all the way from Homer to Xenophon, and can he not read some portions of his vernacular from Chaucer to Longfellow? But we are told "there is no time; the boys now have more than they can do." We grant that the boys have too much to do; and we say, relieve them by giving them something more. Your class to-day has wholly disappointed you in some of its first efforts upon Homer or Herodotus. Well, don't throw several pages of old Ionicisms and Homeric idioms at them, and tell them to learn them; tell them to bring their Chaucers or their Spensers to the next recitation, and read to them, or let them read to you, a few lines to show them the relation of Homer to Xenophon, by pointing out the relation of Chaucer to Goldsmith or Irving; and in a short time the forms and idioms will all be committed, not to memory merely, but to the understanding also. It is not in algebra alone that you can take away by adding. Neither boys nor men walk gracefully in the dark. Let them know their ground, and you will often find their burdens relieved. We carry two pails of water more easily than one.