ortance attached, in America, to reading aloud. In the very opening
sentence of this work, he says, 'La lecture a haute voix compte, en
Amerique, parmi les elements les plus importants de l'instruction
publique; elle est une des bases de l'enseignement primaire.' And
elsewhere he calls upon the people of France to imitate the United
States of North America, in making the art of reading aloud the very
corner-stone of public education! Where could M. Legouve have got this
remarkable opinion of the high estimate, in this country, of reading
aloud, as an educational agency? From whatever source he derived it, it
is certainly most remote from the truth. What Sir Henry Taylor says of
the neglect of the art of reading in England (Correspondence, edited by
Professor Dowden, p. 225), is quite applicable to this country. After
saying that he regards the reading of Shakespeare to boys and girls, if
it be well read and they are apt, 'as carrying with it a deeper
cultivation than anything else which can be done to cultivate them,' he
adds, 'I often think how strange it is that amongst all the efforts
which are made in these times to teach young people everything that is
to be known, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall, the
one thing omitted is teaching them to read. At present, to be sure, it
is a very rare thing to find any one who _can_ teach it; but it is an
art which might be propagated from the few to the many with great
rapidity, if a due appreciation of it were to become current. The rage
for lecturing would be a more reasonable rage if that were taught in
lectures which can be conveyed only by voice and utterance, and not by
books.'

Here, by the way, is indicated what the literary lecture should be. It
is a comparatively easy thing to lecture about literary products and to
deal out literary knowledge of various kinds, and cheap philosophy in
regard to the relations of literature to time and place. A professor of
literature might do this respectably well without much knowledge of the
literature itself. But what students especially need is to be brought
into direct relationship with literature in its essential, absolute
character; so that the very highest form of literary lecturing is
interpretative reading. Such reading brings home to sufficiently
susceptible students what cannot be lectured about--namely, the
intellectually indefinite element of a literary product. Much of what is
otherwise done for students