758 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
for the young, The best work of Vaughan, Herrick, Milton, 
Donne, and their contemporaries, cannot be too highly 
praised, and its effect upon the minds and characters of 
English youth should be very great. I should not hesitate 
to recommend the learning by heart of a large number of 
pieces of this school and period by way of both esthetic 
and moral training. Their influence makes for purity and 
gentleness in life, and what could be a better aim? 
I have now dealt with all those kinds of poetry which I 
believe to be most essential and valuable in the training of 
youth. I must also say something of those kinds which 
should, I think, be either excluded altogether or given a 
very subsidiary place.. The ballad I have not spoken of 
separately, as 1t may be considered a special (and a very 
excellent) kind of lyric poetry; and what I have said of 
lyric in general wil! apply also to our ballad literature—to 
the great unnamed authors represented in Percy, to Coler- 
idge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning as_ballad- 
writers. The following kinds of poetry or verse I should 
mention as being more or less unsuitable for reading in 
schools: —(1) Satire, which is at its best in English a 
growth of exotic character, based upon classical models 
which are hardly admirable in any sense. The satirical 
work of Nash, Oldham, Defoe, .Dryden, Marvell, Pope, 
Churchill, and Dr. Johnson, as well as of the more genuinely 
English Skelton and Butler, may, I think, be neglected in 
schools. I do not think that boys and girls need be 
encouraged to admire the arts of giving pain and making 
personal enemies ridiculous. (2) Pastoral poetry, with some 
exceptions, like “ Lycidas.” Beautiful as the work of our 
best pastoralists is—the work of Drayton, Wither, and 
Browne, for example—it is of exotic inspiration and essen- 
tially false in its prettiness and its optimistic presentment 
of toy-shop humanity. If we want the real poetry of sheep 
and of shepherd, of stream and rock, and wood and mountain, 
we can find it in Wordsworth, in Matthew Arnold, and 
many other poets of our own time. (3) Rhetorical poetry. 
Poetry which is essentially rhetorical and declamatory, 
whose diction is glittering and tawdry, should, I think, be 
barred altogether or relegated to the elocution department. 
Collins’ Ode on the Passions, ¢.g., is admirably suited for 
the training of Wopsles. Mrs. Meynell, I think, recently 
pointed out that Gray’s “Elegy” was unsuitable for 
reading by the young. Her statement aroused much com- 
ment, as the “ Elegy” has been for so long the prime 
favourite among English poems for the schools. I must 
say that on the grounds I have just mentioned, I think Mrs. 
