One of the best points of such a system of literary composition is that even if slower boys cannot effect much, it gives a most wholesome opening to the creative faculties of boys, whose minds, if stifled and compressed, are most likely to work in unwholesome and tormenting directions.

My suggestion then becomes part of a larger plea, the plea for more direct cultivation of enjoyment in education.  Some of our worst mistakes in education arise from our not basing it upon the actual needs and faculties of human nature, but upon the supposed constitution of a child constructed by the starved imagination of pedants and moralists and practical men.

One of the first requisites in cultivating intellectual and artistic pleasure is to build up taste out of the actual perceptions of the child.  That is a factor which has been most stubbornly and unintelligently disregarded in education.  Developments in character are of the nature of living things; they cannot be superimposed they must be rooted in the temperament and they must draw nurture and sustenance out of the spirit, as the seed imbibes its substance from the unseen soil and the hidden waters.  But what has been constantly done is to introduce the broadest effects and the simplest romance, directly and suddenly to the biggest masterpieces.  The absence of all gradation and reconciliation has been characteristic of our literary education.  Of course there is an initial difficulty in the case of the classics, that there is very little in either Greek or Latin which really appeals to an immature taste at all; and such books as might appeal to inquisitive and inexperienced minds, such as Homer or the Anabasis of Xenophon, are made unattractive by the method of giving such short snippets, and insisting on what used to be called thorough parsing.  Even Alice in Wonderland, let me say, could only prove a drearily bewildering book, if read at the rate of twenty lines a lesson, and if the principal tenses of all the verbs had to be repeated correctly.  It is absolutely essential, if any love of literature is to be superinduced, that something should be read fast enough to give some sense of continuity and range and horizon.  The practice of dictionary-turning is sufficient by itself to destroy intellectual pleasure, but it used to be defended as a base sort of bribe to strengthen memory:  it was argued that boys would try to remember words to save themselves the trouble of looking them up.  But this has no origin in fact.  Boys used not to be encouraged to guess at words, but to be punished for shirking work if they had not looked them out.  It is to be hoped that English will be in the future increasingly taught in schools; but even so there is the danger of connecting it too much with erudition.  The old Clarendon Press Shakespeare was an almost perfect example of how not to edit Shakespeare for boys; the introductions were learned and scholarly, the notes were crammed