506 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
when there is little leisure for the enjoyment of a book that requires 
deliberate reading. If the modern strenuous curriculum of work and 
games has abolished the loafer it has also abolished leisure, and has 
therefore removed one of the opportunities that used to exist for the 
cultivation of literary and artistic tastes and pursuits by those to whom 
they are congenial. The art of expressing one’s ideas in simple, 
straightforward language is to be acquired not so much by study as by 
practise. There is no essential reason why children should write worse 
than they speak; they do so because they have constant practise in the 
one and little practise in the other. Our grandparents felt less diffi- 
culty in expressing themselves clearly than we do ourselves: of this 
their letters are evidence. It may have been partly due to the fact that 
they had more time and encouragement for leisurely reading, though 
they had not so much to read; but I believe that the letters which they 
wrote as children were their real education in the art of writing Eng- 
lish. Much would be gained if boys and girls were constantly required 
to express their own meaning in writing. The set essay and the précis 
play a useful part, but do not do all that is needed. Translation does 
not give quite the necessary exercise. What is required is constant, 
with certain periods of conscious, practise, and that is only to be 
obtained by making every piece of school work in which the English 
language is used an exercise in lucid expression. Wery few paragraphs 
in anything written by the ordinary schoolboy— or, for the matter of 
that, by the ordinary educated Englishman—are wholly intelligible, 
and teachers can not devote too much pains to criticizing all written 
work from this point of view. If we first learned by practise to express 
our meaning clearly we should be more likely to acquire the graces of an 
elegant style later. I must add that I believe the training in the 
manipulation of words would be improved if all children were required 
to practise the writing of English verse—not in efforts to write poetry, 
but narrative verse used to express simple ideas in plain language—and 
I believe that this would enable them the better to appreciate poetry, 
the love of which is possibly now to some extent stifled by the pedantic 
study of beautiful poems treated as school tasks. 
In such a subject as English composition, in which reform is so 
_ badly needed, something, perhaps, would be gained by an entire break 
with existing traditions—a break of the sort which would be required if 
it became suddenly necessary to provide for an entirely new type of 
student. 
Now, there is one new and interesting development in which, for the 
first time, an opportunity offers itself of dealing with a body of stu- 
dents who, although possessed of more than average intelligence and 
enthusiasm, have not received the conventional training which leads 
to a university course. The tutorial classes for working people which 
have now been undertaken by several universities, and which already 
