imitated by the pupils. Such splendid matter as Henley and Whibley's
collection of Elizabethan Prose, for example, might well find a place
toward the end of that series of books. There would be an anthology of
English lyrics, of all the best short stories in our language, of all
the best episodes. From these readers the pupil would pass, still often
reading and reciting aloud, to such a series of masterpieces as an
efficient English Language Society could force upon every school. At
present in English schools a library is an exception rather than a
rule, and your clerical head-master on public occasions will cheerfully
denounce the "trash" reading, "snippet" reading habits of the age, with
that defect lying like a feather on his expert conscience. A school
without an easily accessible library of at least a thousand volumes is
really scarcely a school at all--it is a dispensary without bottles, a
kitchen without a pantry. For all that, if the inquiring New Republican
find two hundred linen-covered volumes of the _Eric, or Little by
Little_ type, mean goody-goody thought dressed in its appropriate
language, stored away in some damp cupboard of his son's school, and
accessible once a week, he may feel assured things are above the
average there. My imaginary English Language Society would make it a
fundamental duty, firstly to render that library of at least a thousand
volumes or so specially cheap and easily procurable, and secondly, by
pamphlets and agitation, to render it a compulsory minimum requirement
for every grade of school. It is far more important, and it would be
far less costly even as things are, than the cheapest sort of chemical
laboratory a school could have, and it should cost scarcely more than a
school piano.

I know very little of the practical teaching of English, my own very
fragmentary knowledge of the more familiar cliches of our tongue was
acquired in a haphazard fashion, but I am inclined to think that in