little practice. Two processes are requisite to the performance. First, you must learn the art of keeping the eye and mind in advance of the tongue; and, secondly, you must learn, while the head is erect, to read by turning the eyes down to a book placed below you, but yet at the angle most convenient to sight and which you must ascertain at the moment, for it varies with the nature of the composition, the size of the type, and

even the quality of the paper. If your audience did not look at you when reading, this position of the eye would, if unrelieved, be inconvenient only to yourself. But an audience must be looked at by you, as well as look at you, or you will not secure their attention. A reader, you must remember, is not a mere conduit pipe, to convey the words of the book to the minds of the listeners a good reader communicates directly with his audience; he makes the ideas of the author so much his own, when transmitted through his mind, that they come from him animated and inspired by something of his own living spirit, so that the minds of the listeners feel themselves in communion with his mind, and there is a consciousness that the intercourse is intellectual and not mechanical merely. Strive, then, that your reading shall sound and seem as little like reading, and as much like speaking, as possible: give to what you say, and to the manner of saying it, the air of being the utterance of your own mind rather than the mere repetition of the production of another mind, and this you can accomplish only by repeatedly raising your eyes from the book and looking at the audience while you complete the sentence which the eye and the mind, travelling before the tongue, have committed to the memory.

I have now said all that occurs to me as likely to be

useful to you respecting that portion of the Art of Reading which depends upon the physical processes. But in the cultivation of these powers you must not forget that they are intimately allied with the intellectual processes. No single movement of the smallest muscle employed in the art of reading is purely mechanical; it is governed more or less by mental emotions, with which it vibrates in a mysterious sympathy you can neither prompt nor control. The voice will express in tones and in tremors the feelings that are flashing through the brain, and the main object of all your studies and strivings will be, not so much to acquire something new, as to remove the bad habits by which the natural expression is impeded. You will have a great deal more to unlearn than to learn. Your endeavour from the beginning should be to go back to nature-to have faith in her to find out what in your practice is artificial, and what is true, and by persevering effort to emancipate yourself from the slavery of habit. In these suggestions I have sought to consult nature alone, and I have given very little attention to the "rules" which professional writers and teachers have promulgated. I never met any person who had profited by them. It is not that it can be asserted of any of them, examined individually, that they are erroneous; they err only in that they attempt to reduce to rule an art which cannot, like science, be reduced to rule. I challenge the proof to be thus tried. Let a page of any book be read strictly according to the rules of any treatise on, or teacher of, elocution; it will be found intolerably starched, ungainly and stupid. Continually the infinite variations of the thought to be expressed will enforce a departure from the letter of the rule. Either the rule must bend to

the meaning, or the meaning will be murdered by the rule. Are not rules, that exist only by elasticity such as this, more likely to hinder than to help? Reflection and experience have combined to convince me that so it is, and therefore I have ventured, in defiance of the authorities, to throw aside the conventional code and have endeavoured to trace out for you a new path to the Art of Reading.

There is danger always, and with all of us, that we may exaggerate the importance of any subject that has engaged much of our attention, and therefore I am desirous of strengthening the views I have been so many years trying to promulgate, as to the necessity for making the art of reading a branch of education in all schools, and by all classes, by reference to some higher authorities. I therefore cite two passages from two of our ablest journals, which express, in more powerful language than I can command, very nearly the views I have long advocated. The first is from the Saturday

Review.

But the clergy are not the only class who read badly, though, since reading forms so large a portion of their duty, their deficiencies are especially conspicuous. Bad reading is far more common than good, among all classes, from the charity children whose monotonous twang in the responses of the Liturgy tortures every sensitive ear, up to the most refined and best educated. It is not merely that, in the art of reading aloud, as in every other application of knowledge to practice, the number of those who attain excellence is a very small percentage on the total number of persons who practise it at all. The point in which the art of reading seems exceptional is, that the average skill in doing what every one does more or less is disgracefully small. One reason for this is obvious enough-it is not considered a part of education to teach children to read aloud. Some few schools, perhaps, are exceptions to this rule of universal neglect; and there are men who call themselves professors of elocution, and undertake to

remedy a mischief which need never have been done. But in the great majority of instances, a boy, during his school years, not only is not taught how to read well, but actually learns to read badly. Construing Greek and Latin authors, in the orthodox school fashion, is about the best possible means for giving a boy the habit of reading as if he was a mere machine, neither knowing nor caring for the sense of the words his tongue is uttering. Three or four words of Latin, then the corresponding English, alternated through several sentences with blunders and stoppages intermixed, or, at best, a hesitation every now and then because he is not quite sure of the right order or right meaning of the words before him-this is the style of reading which a schoolboy practises, day after day for several years of his life, just at the age when habits are most easily and permanently formed. This may be necessary, possibly, to the acquirement of Greek and Latin, but at any rate, there is no doubt of the effect produced as regards the reading of English; and on the face of it, one might almost wonder that any one who has passed through the ordinary education of a gentleman ever so far escapes the evil influence of it as to read aloud even respectably well. The same remarks are true of girls learning modern languages, though perhaps in a less degree. The construing period does not last so long with them, and the construing method is not so rigorously applied to French and German. One does not, however, hear ladies read aloud so often as men: and the different quality of the female voice makes their defects less striking to the ear than the bad reading of rougher-toned men. The first requisite towards obtaining a generation able to read clearly and intelligibly is a little care in schoolmasters and other teachers. Let the pupils construe, if it must be so, their Latin lessons in a manner heart-breaking to those who care for the sense or sound of the author's language; but then let them be also accustomed to read the same or other books as they ought to be read-with due attention to stops, construction and emphasis. If this is not done universally—if boys are not made to read history, notes and references on the lessons before them, and everything else that comes in their way, in an intelligent manner-special instruction in elocution will be of very little use, particularly if it is deferred till the boy has become a man. He has then to conquer the habits which have

grown upon him ever since he first went to school-perhaps fifteen years before-and the task is become a difficult, almost a hopeless one.

But it is worth while to inquire why people need to be taught the art of reading at all. What is the difference between speaking and reading? How is it that, for twenty persons whose tones and expression is natural enough when they are uttering their own thoughts in conversation, hardly one can read aloud in an intelligent and straightforward manner? The explanation does not lie in the fact that a man, in speaking, uses his own words, and in reading, the words of another, for men do not seem to read their own writings any better than other people's. One of the commonest excuses made by clergymen for preaching extempore is, that they cannot deliver a written sermon with equal effect. The excuse is not altogether a valid one, for not a few masters of the art contrive to make their reading as effective as any speaking could be; but no doubt it is more difficult so to do. Nor is the reason to be found in the restraint of natural motion and gesture imposed by the necessity of keeping the eye fixed, more or less continuously, on the book or paper to be read from; for a person who can recite well is quite as rare as one who can read well. Even on the stage, where the first business of the performer is, or ought to be, elocution in its various branches, one very seldom hears a speech which consists of a simple narration of facts, or the like, and is not strongly marked by some emotion or comic peculiarity, delivered in a natural manner. The difficulty of reading aloud, or of reciting, seems to consist in keeping to a fixed form of words which are not the spontaneous expression of the reader's thoughts. His mind is already occupied in gathering the actual words which the tongue is to utter-from the book in the one case, by means of the eye, from the memory in the other case-and finds some difficulty in attending at the same time to their meaning, and to the expression which ought consequently to be given to them. In speaking, on the contrary, words and expression all form part of the clothing given to the thoughts. A man knows what he means by the words in which he gives utterance to his own thought, and the tone and emphasis are the audible expression of that meaning. Of course he may be at a loss for words, or he may form a wrong notion of the im