happiness, our heroism."

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a town called Abdera. The
good people of the town were so much upset at seeing a performance of
the _Andromeda_ of Euripides that they caught a sort of tragic fever.
This began with bleeding and perspiration and was followed in about a
week's time, according to the course of the disease, by an
uncontrollable desire to recite. The effect upon Abdera was
surprising. The people walked about in the streets day and night
reciting pages of Euripides until the epidemic was cured by a return
of the cold weather. Well, Tolstoy would have us believe that the
European and English-speaking world to-day is about in this condition
regarding Shakespeare, and that there is little hope of a cold spell.
A second-rate fellow, this Bard of Avon, according to Tolstoy, whom by
a gigantic process of hypnotic suggestion we have been taught to think
great, till we go about quoting him as the law and the prophet, while
he fills some hundred and seventeen pages of Bartlett.

There is undoubtedly something in this view of the matter. Without
holding a brief either for the alleged immortal William or the author
of _What Is Art?_, it may safely be hazarded that at least fifty per
cent of the "familiar quotations" we children laboriously copied into
ruled blank books in our school days and have ever since regarded as
nuggets of truth and gems of poetry are neither true nor, beyond the
fact of rhyme, poetic. Something as a wave of suggestion passed over
Europe and sent thousands of little ones down to their deaths in the
Children's Crusades, thousands of youngsters in our schools to-day are
hypnotized into a lasting belief in the poetic value of numberless
couplets of second-rate verse, and never come to know real poetry at
all. Having been forced to swallow rhymed platitudes in the belief
that they are poetry, a permanent and perfectly natural repulsion for
the very name of poetry is too often the children's only acquisition.
In fact, it is a pretty question if the decline of poetic appreciation
cannot be directly traced to the rise of the memory-gem book.

How well I remember my own sense of weariness and repulsion when I was
compelled at the tender age of ten to copy out the whole of _The Psalm
of Life_, unconsciously committing it to memory as I did so.

Life is real, life is earnest,
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was