narrative poem by Tennyson, that interest may lead you to find other long narrative poems, perhaps by one of the older authors like Scott, or by a man who is writing today, like John Masefield. Interest in Shakespeare's plays helps you to read with pleasure the plays of Sheridan or Goldsmith, written in the eighteenth century, or the plays of Bernard Shaw, who belongs to our own time. If you find nature essays by Burroughs attractive, they will lead you to older writings on similar subjects by the American author Thoreau or by the English author Gilbert White of Selborne, and you will find, perhaps, that some of the most fascinating work of this kind ever written was produced by W. H. Hudson, who died only the other day.

But this method, excellent as it is, needs supplementing by another.

In this book is presented the story of a great literature as it has developed through more than twelve centuries. This story is a commentary or explanation, designed to help you to interpret the literature that is your true subject of study. As you read it, you will fit in the many books and poems that you have read in previous years. When you come to Tennyson, for example, you will do this; you will also read some new poems by him, and thus you will be prepared to do further reading, on your own account, and to relate Tennyson's work to that of other writers of his own time and writers in other periods of English literature. You will also make new acquaintance through reading some of the things written by authors who have not been represented in your study in previous years.

Thus the purpose of your study is twofold. You will gain a systematic knowledge of the history of English literature, and this outline you will enrich not only by a large body of new selections but also by recalling all that you have learned earlier in your course. The outline is not an end in itself, but only a means for arranging your knowledge of the subject in an orderly manner. Not only what we know but the command we have over our knowledge is important. Miscellaneous information is one thing; systematic knowledge is quite another.

Your great danger will be that of depending, or trying to depend, on memorizing facts. It is necessary to deal with facts, to remember them, and to cultivate a habit of scrupulous accuracy. But there are several ways of dealing with facts.

One way is to try to convert the mind into a sort of encyclopedia. You just memorize everything. But such a method is wasteful, because no one can hope to master the whole of knowledge, and no one needs to. The well-informed man is not the man who has made of himself a walking encyclopedia, but the one who knows the chief things and knows how to collect further information on any topic when need arises. On the other hand, the wellinformed man does not resort to guessing or imagining or to hearsay. He knows. One sort of person is an animated fact-bag. Another is a sort of human jelly-fish, open to new impressions, new theories, but with no intelligence or power of testing for himself. He is spineless.

Neither the animated fact-bag nor the human jelly-fish has any mastery of knowledge. It is a high compliment we pay a man when we say of him, "He knows what he is talking about." "He knows."

Your study of this book, like your study of other subjects in this last year of your high-school course, should do much to make you well-informed. "Informed" is a spiritual as well as a mental state. It involves your character, your personality; it is a quality that possesses you rather than a mass of material that you possess.

In order to assist you in the use of literature as a means for making you a wellinformed person, many exercises and studies are distributed through this book. Some of these are questions designed to guide your reading of a selection. Some of them are questions or topics that relate these selections to the story or commentary. Others send you to books in the library, or to selections used in previous years. In all of them a report, oral or written, is implied.

Skill in making a report is one of the highest tests of your intelligence. Some reports are merely paraphrases or condensations of articles in books of reference. Such condensation, if well done, is excellent

training in the power to convert the dead facts of the book into such form as to be of use to you and to the person to whom you make the report. It is badly done if you merely take fifty words out of a hundred that the author used, or three sentences out of ten. You will need to make an entirely new essay, clothed in your own language. In taking notes, you will not copy complete sentences, or even parts of sentences, unless the statement is one of great importance on which you desire the advantage of expert opinion. In every case where you copy the words of the author, you will use quotation marks and you will state the author, book, and page which you use.

A different sort of report is one in which you must collect your material from various sources or from your own observation. In such a case it is best to use small cards, putting only one item on a card, with careful references to the sources of your information. These cards may be arranged according to subject-matter or their relations to the main heads of your report, and will then be ready for use in an oral report or for the writing of a paper.

Accuracy in every detail, scrupulous care in giving the source of every statement that you make, and skill in arranging your material so that your presentation is clear and interesting, are the tests of a good report.

WILLIAM CAXTON, THE FIRST ENGLISH PRINTER, SHOWING A SAMPLE OF HIS PRINTING TO FRIENDS

-Old

The Making of England. England was the dwelling place of men long before the dawn of history. The earliest of these followed hard upon the retreat of the ice and the lifting of the mists from the fens of the new land. Some of them left traces that have lasted to our own daymonuments, graves filled with rude implements, a few inscriptions. In the course of centuries-we know not how manythey were exterminated or absorbed by stronger races, sweeping in waves from the continent-the Celts, the Romans, and, later, the hordes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. During these centuries, earlier civilizations, in other parts of the earth, rose from barbarism, attained wide dominion, and lapsed again into barbarism. There is little to connect the founding of England with these ancient civilizations; the old Greek and Roman culture was long in reaching the races that were one day to form the nations of modern Europe. It is true that Britain was a colony of

Rome from Caesar's invasion (55 B.C.) to the withdrawal of the Roman legions at the beginning of the fifth century (407-410 A.D.); yet a few Latin words in Old English, and a few monuments, are all that remain to tell of centuries filled with the activities of colonizers who drained marshes, built great roads, reduced waste lands to the uses of agriculture, built up a great export trade. When the Romans left, they were forgotten by the Celts, who swarmed back from Scotland and Wales, themselves to be dispossessed once more, in the last half of the fifth century, by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who were at last to lay the foundations of the English nation.

The Slow Growth of National Feeling. In this period of migrations and the clashing of rival tribes, there was little national feeling or culture. All these tribes had their ballads and legends, raw material from which literature was one day to be made, just as all of them had their tribal customs and their primitive modes of