the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levelers. They give to all who will faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am, no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling, if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.

Another means of self-culture may be found by every man in his condition or occupation, be it what it may. Now the man, who, in working, no matter in what way, strives perpetually to fulfill his obligations thoroughly, to do his whole work faithfully, to be honest, not because honesty is the best policy, but for the sake of justice, and that he may render to every man his due, such a laborer is continually building up in himself one of the greatest principles of morality and religion. Every blow on the anvil, on the earth, or whatever material he works upon, contributes something to the perfection of his

nature.

Labor may be so performed as to be a high impulse to the mind. Be a man's vocation what it may, his rule should be to do his duties perfectly, to do the best he can, and thus to make perpetual progress in his art. In other words, perfection should be proposed; and this I urge not only for its usefulness to society, nor for the sincere pleasure which a man takes in seeing a work well done.

I would that I could speak with an awakening voice to the people of their wants, their privileges, their responsibilities. I would say to them, You cannot, without guilt and disgrace, stop where you are. The past and the present call on you to advance. Let what you have gained be an impulse to something higher. Your nature is too great to be crushed. You were not created what you are merely to toil, eat, drink, and

sleep, like the inferior animals. If you will, you can rise. No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent. Do not be lulled to sleep by the flatteries which you hear, as if your participation in the national sovereignty made you equal to the noblest of your race. You have many and great deficiencies to be remedied; and the remedy lies, not in the ballot box, not in the exercise of your political powers, but in the faithful education of yourselves and your children. These truths you have often heard and slept over. Awake! Resolve earnestly on self-culture. Make yourselves worthy of your free institutions, and strengthen and perpetuate them by your intelligence and your virtues.

THE TRUE GENTLEMAN

How to Study

By EDWARD EVERETT HALE

HE perfection of methods of study seems to have been attained in the best work of the English colleges. A young man who wants to work engages a special tutor, who is technically called his "coach." This gentleman has made it his business to teach certain subjects. He has very few pupils, probably no more than four or five. You go to him, say, at eight in the morning. You sit at the same table and absolutely study with him. He gives you his personal help in the process of study. You look out your words in the dictionary together. Why, he would even show you technical details in handling the dictionary, if you needed; he would show you how to arrange your notes, and tell you the traditions of the best way to work. After an hour of such joint study, you would leave and work for three hours alone. At twelve or at one, perhaps, you would meet him again and all his other pupils, three or four, perhaps. For one hour you would then work all together on the subject or book which you had been working on separately. By such a system you seem to gain every advantage. You work with a superior, you work alone, and you and your peers work with a superior. You must be dull, indeed, if you do not find in such a method full stimulus. The plan in such an outline as I have made gives, probably, the best period for daily work on books. Five hours such study is enough. You might read all day. Reading can hardly be called work. But reading with the purpose of study is quite a different affair from reading for mere amusement. When you are really working you

had better not attempt more than five hours a day. And I do not believe in varying from the average. Of course there may be excuses for such deviation. But one should not plan with any idea of making occasionally what the French call a "turn of force" with which to overtake your omissions. College boys are apt to loaf through half a term, and think to make up by cramming at the end. You cannot do it. It is hard to loaf at the beginning of a day's march, and make up by a stiff pull in the evening. But that plan is much more likely to succeed than is the corresponding effort which treats the brain to a turn of laziness, and proposes to pick up dropped stitches by a spurt at the end.

We know curiously little about the methods of brain work. But we do know this, that the brain is very sensitive, and that its full faculty is very soon exhausted. Thus the best teachers of shorthand will tell you that when you have practiced fifteen minutes on that art you had better wait-perhaps till the next day-before you practice again. In the same way Mr. Prendergast, the great teacher of language, says squarely that the power of acquiring words by memory is well-nigh exhausted in fifteen minutes. After you have studied so long on his exercises, he would like to have you wait for one or two hours. A friend of mine who studied with him went to him six times a day; the result of which was that at the end of six weeks this gentleman could speak German, though he understood nothing of it before. How sadly this makes me watch those wretched school exercises in which, after three unbroken hours, perhaps, the poor sensitive brain of the jaded child is expected to turn out as much and as good work as it did at the beginning. But this only applies to one line of study, which is, indeed, comparatively unimportant, namely, the committing words to memory. Fortunately, we have not a great deal of this to do. Even the difficulty of learning language is much exaggerated. And it is in learning language that this memory business, in its mechanical forms, is most called upon. Now, let it be observed that few of us in daily life, in what we speak and hear and write in letters, use more than three thousand words. Three thousand words is a very good vocabulary, whether for speaking

or for understanding the speech of others. Suppose, then, that in learning a foreign language you learn thirty words a day. You must learn them thoroughly. You must not forget them. Day by day you must review and refresh your knowledge of them. In one hundred such days you will have learned the three thousand words necessary for the vocabulary of your knowledge of a new language. In the same time you must learn the declensions of the nouns and the inflections of the verbs.

When one is in a foreign country he does this without much thought. He reads the words on the signs of the shops. He hears the talk of cabmen and omnibus drivers. He has to order his own meals at times, or to give his own instructions about luggage. The reason why we spend years at home in gaining a poor smattering of some language which we might learn well in four months, is that at home we have, perhaps, a teacher who knows very little of what he teaches, and also that we turn away from the lesson in language to do something else, and think of something else, and come back to it almost as to a new and strange affair.

I think myself that we spend too much time in most of our schools in the study of language. When I was in Buda-Pesth, I asked a Hungarian gentleman, who was of just my own age, how he was taught Latin, a language which he spoke as easily as his own. He said he was sent to school at eleven years of age, and was told there that if, after a month, he was heard speaking any language but Latin, he would be whipped. You may be sure he learned a thousand words of Latin before that whipping period came. He was surrounded by boys who spoke it, his teachers spoke it, his books were written in it. You may almost say he could not help himself. We generally reverse all this. We keep the boy in an atmosphere of English. A teacher who has read only as much Latin in all his life as there is of English in two volumes of Dickens, undertakes, at intervals, to teach the boy a language of which he does not know much himself; and the usual result is that at the end of six or seven years of such mistaken effort, the boy throws the language over and says he does not care for the classics. We are