Ist. It is of importance that you should rightly understand what you read. Never allow yourselves to acquire a habit of careless reading; never skip. It may be that in this volume you will find some passages hard to understand, some word, some phrase, or some allusion. These should be noted, that you may ask your teacher about them when an opportunity presents itself. A Dictionary for the hard words is a dumb teacher that may always be consulted. But there are many things about the following extracts and poems that you may learn for yourselves without any aid from others. Always try to get the full meaning of the passage —not only the literal meaning of the words, but its spirit. Put yourselves in the place of the speaker, and read, and re-read till the picture of what you are reading rises to your mind's eye.

There are two great faults that you should avoid. If you read only for the sake of the story you will assuredly miss much that would please a careful reader. All the wise thoughts and sweet melodies of well-chosen words will escape you. You will be like a man who, walking through a garden only to find out where it ends, fails to enjoy the scent and colour and form of the flowers and the trees. And again, if you read only for the sound, that your ears may be charmed with the music of a poem or a peroration, you may miss the sense. In order fully to understand and enjoy a passage you must attend both to its sense and to its sound, that is, to the matter of a piece and to its form. You will soon learn to judge whether a thought is well ex

pressed or not, and will find it excellent practice to try to express it in a way that pleases you better.

In illustration of these remarks let us take the first extract in this volume-the Epitaph on a Jacobite. First, we will consider its matter-what it tells us what it is about.

It is, you will see, the inscription on a nameless tombstone in a foreign country. It is the epitaph of one who died of "a broken heart," whose hair had grown grey with sorrow though he was still young ("in manhood's prime"). We are not told who the poor fellow was, but we are told several things about him. First, that he

Heard on Lavernia Scargill's whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees.

Now Arno, we know, is the river in Italy on which Florence is built; not very far from Florence, among the wild mountains of the Apennines, is a mass of sandstone rock, called the Penna della Vernia, or Ridge of Lavernia. In the neighbourhood are beautiful forests. So that, living in Italy, the woods of Lavernia remind him of the trees of Scargill, just as the river Arno reminds him of the Tees. The Tees, you know, divides the counties of Durham and Yorkshire, and Scargill Cliff is in the N.W. corner of Yorkshire, a little south of Barnard Castle, and not far from the junction of the Greta with the Tees. It is the wild and beautiful part of the country that is celebrated by Sir Walter Scott in Rokeby, where the caves

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of Scargill are the retreat of Guy Denzil and his comrades:

A little entrance low and square,
Like opening cell of hermit lone,

Dark, winding through the living stone.

Here entered Denzil, Bertram here.

It is then a Yorkshireman, with his broad accent and his sturdy frame, who lies buried here. Under the blue Italian sky, in valleys where the orange and the palm and the sweet myrtle grow out of doors, or standing "on the hard rock 'twixt Arno and the Tiber" he pines and languishes. He longs for the wild moorland and the little mountain' sheep, the black cliffs of slippery shale, for the cormorants and the crows, and the wild storm, and the hospitable Yorkshire home. Why does he not go back? Ah! there is the sorrow: he is an exile.

Now you must recall your history. You re member that when King James II. was driven from England and from the throne, he left many persons in England who still held that he was the rightful king, and that these were called Facobites, from the Latin Facobus-James. You remember that when King James died his supporters transferred their allegiance to his son, the Old Pretender, and in due course to his son, the Young Pretender. If you turn to your history, you will find that these men lived abroad with their little courts around them, and that on two memorable occasions they made armed attempts to regain the throne of the Stuarts (1715 and 1745), which ended in ruin for themselves and their supporters. As both their

rebellions began in the north of England, we may suppose that the subject of this poem took part in one of them. He lost all "lands, honours, wealth." For the sake of one whom he regarded as his "true king" he gave up all his possessions,

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And one dear hope that was more prized than they.

What was this? it was too dear, too sacred to name. But though we are left to guess its nature, we can see that he gave up his love as well as his lands. How touching is his reference to the selfish prince! He does not blame him; but the half parenthesis, "vain faith and courage vain," shows how bitterly he had been disappointed in him. And now, hopeless, ruined and alone, he longs for rest, and soon

God, who saw me tried too sorely, gave

The resting-place I asked -an early grave.`

2nd.-Next let us consider the form. This is a poem. How does a poem differ from a piece of prose? If you read both aloud you will find that in a poem the accents are generally at regular intervals, while in prose they are at irregular intervals. Compare

By these white cliffs I never more must see, with

It is a great pleasure to read an interesting book.

In each line there are five accents, but in the first they occur on every second syllable; in the second line they are irregular: the line is prose.

In this poem the lines rhyme. Every pair of

lines or couplet ends with the same sound. But if you look through the book you will find that poems differ in these respects. Some are without rhyme at all: they are in blank verse. Others have more or less than five accents in a line, and sometimes the accents are on every third syllable, as

I am monarch of all I survey;

My right there is none to dispute.

You can learn for yourselves to distinguish the various kinds of music that are found in verse, and to note how the peculiar music or measure of each fits and helps to express more powerfully the meaning. As you learn to do this you will notice further, that even in poetry the accents do not always lie exactly where you would expect them; thus in

Oh thou whom chance leads to this nameless stone, the accent is on leads, and not on to, as you would expect. And you will find that the music of the poem depends very greatly on the regular variation of accent, and on the place in which the pause occurs. In rhymed couplets, such as these, the pause is generally at the end of the line, for the sound of the rhyme generally makes us dwell a little on the last word. But not always: 'thus

Till God, who saw me tried too sorely, gave

The resting-place I asked.

Here the pause is in the middle of the second line, after asked. Some people read without any attention to the place of the accent and the pause, and their reading is monotonous. It makes us