child and of the spare meals we have allowed him, the very last ounce of result they have had it in them to yield. But of this we shall have more to say later.

Now, we shall be less prone to exhaust the child

The prehensile power of rational and analytic, as The way to get him to

this effort to "draw him out," and get him to overhaul and dissect and play the showman to his possessions, if we bear in mind more constantly the nature of the assimilative process; so that we may assist rather than retard it. the child is not so much imaginative and imitative. appropriate a fact or idea is not to labor with him until he knows that he knows, but to insure some sort of unconscious imitative reaction. He must unconsciously do something about it. Froebel brought into convincing clearness the fact that the process of assimilation is by no means a passive or receptive process. Self-activity in some form or other is the means whereby the child affirms his possession of new knowledge and idea. He learns by doing, said Froebel; and this may pass muster if we do not press it too literally and too far. He learns to sing by singing, of course; he learns to see by drawing or modelling; to touch and measure by cutting, etc., and he learns to know this personage, story-hero, fairy, animal, flower, tree, by being it, living with its life, imitating it. We conclude that everything

he sees and hears evokes a motor responsiveness in him; it comes loaded with motor suggestion and starts a process of motor reaction, a process that education may either inhibit or encourage. It is not necessary, however, that he should actually reenact the story he has heard, that he should physically do something about it; he may react imaginatively. As he recalls in the darkness the story of Red Riding Hood, he becomes in dramatic imagination, i.e. in the form of imaginative self-activity, both the horrible wolf and the unfortunate little maid, "the slayer and the slain." His is the self-obliterating imaginative

sympathy of the poet:

"This price the gods exact for song, —

That we become what we sing."

Children are poets in this sense: they, too, become what they see and hear; and, with a still greater intensity, what they admire and love. They might remain at bottom poets, they might bring to life the divine sympathies, the quick, deep fellow-feeling of the poets, if we would only deal tenderly with their marvellous gift. It is because this imitative tendency and power, rooted in imaginative sympathy, plays or ought to play such an important part in our literary work, that at the cost of seeming irrelevancy, something more must be said about it. It is, whether she realizes it or not, the supreme instrument in the teacher's power. Understood in its broader sense, it alone explains the forma

tive influence of literature and all the arts an influence

exercised so fatally for good or ill over the young, that Plato proposed to institute in his new Republic the severest sort of censorship over poets and artists solely in the interests of the young. This fatal power the teacher has at her command both through her personality, and through the characters and actions which are brought, by picture and song, before the mind's eye of the child. Through it, more than any reasoning or other power, the child learns to lisp and speak, learns the higher uses of language, learns to write well, to form a style, to borrow, to take fire, to admire and fathom and interpret the work of the masters.

No apology is needed for another reference to Plato, but the writer may preface it with the explanation that he has found no book more profoundly suggestive in his own practical work than the "Republic," and especially those chapters which are now so conveniently edited by Dr. Bosanquet under the title "The Education of the Young in the Republic of Plato." It is here that we have a treatment of the subject of imitation that cannot fail to be helpful and stimulating in the teaching of English. Let us take Walter Pater's convenient summary of it:

"Imitation: it enters into the very fastnesses of character; and we, our souls, ourselves, are for ever imitating what we see and hear, the forms, the sounds which haunt our memories, our imagination. We imi

D

tate not only if we play a part on the stage, but when we sit as spectators, while our thoughts follow the acting of another, when we read Homer and put ourselves lightly, fluently, into the place of those he describes : we imitate unconsciously the line and colour of the walls around us, the trees by the wayside, the animals we pet or make use of, the very dress we wear. Men, children are susceptible beings, in great measure conditioned by the mere look of their 'medium.' Like those insects, we might fancy, of which naturalists tell us, taking colour from the plants they lodge on, they will come to match with much servility the aspects of the world about them." ("Plato and Platonism," pp. 245-6.)

This is a much deeper and more fruitful conception than the one we commonly meet with — such, for example, as this, taken from a well-known work: "Imitation has to do with actions, external things that can be seen." Plato's doctrine illuminatingly explains to us that it is by virtue of the imitative tendency in us, and especially in children, that environment counts for so much in our lives. It is provoking us to subtle forms of imitation. Through our work in English, then, we are creating the spiritual environment of the child, not the external environment of things and scenes, but the internal environment, the atmosphere shed about him by the presences with which he holds daily converse, among them, those ideal imagined

presences, their thoughts and sayings and deeds, which literature brings into his field of intercourse.

This doctrine of imitation, which we must regard at the outset as such a supreme factor in our literary work, might receive suggestive illustration: we will cite only two examples. The first is from Walt Whitman:

"There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day,

Or for years or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child.

The second, the most exquisite and most subtile expression in our literature, is in Wordsworth's familiar verses, beginning, "Three years she grew in sun and shower" (sometimes called "The Education of Nature"), wherein he sings how the great educator, Nature, by her companionship of the child, Lucy, will make of her a lady of her own:

"And her's shall be the breathing balm,

And her's the silence and the calm

Of mute insensate things.

The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place,

Where rivulets dance their wayward round;
And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face."

Kindergarten theory and practice have recognized the importance of the imitative instinct, and of giving