1. I Will Bury Myself In My Books And The Devil May Pipe To His Own.

By the time a person arrives at the college age he should be master of a library of at least a hundred books which he has read with understanding. Some of them he will have read through several times. There are certain boys' books which show the results of wear and tear, re-reading, and lending, to be found in many a private collection. Are pseudo-sophisticated college Freshmen ashamed to have them on their shelves? Their contents are as much a part of those Freshmen as are their own finger nails. Who need blush for shame if a friend find on a lower shelf: Gayley's "Classic Myths", or Stevenson's "A Garden of Childhood Verse", or Slosson's "Creative Chemistry", or Howard Pyle's "Robin Hood" and "Men of Iron", or "This Singing World", or the volumes of "Negro Spirituals", or Van Loon's "The Story of Mankind" even if it is used as a secondary school text? The four years in college can be used for the collection of a treasure-house of printed material much of which will be read again during more mature years. A college man's or a college woman's private library would help a teacher of speech a great deal toward estimating the student's probable success as an occasional speaker or debater.

As references for speech-making your public library memberships should serve as recommendations as trustworthy as your club affiliations. A Belfast, A Belfast, Maine,

librarian remarked sadly one summer morning that for every copy of Christopher Morley's "Thunder on the Left", popular as it was, which the library stocked, it was necessary to put on the shelves five copies of the Passions of Polly sort of book. So we grant that the quality of books used is of more importance than the number. Moreover, it is more impressive to be able to report an acquaintance with, or knowledge of, the old masters than it is to be able to recite the titles of the Six Best Sellers of last month and tell what you think of them. A careful study made of the Six Best of each month since the turn of the Century revealed the names of no more presently valued books than one could count on the fingers of one hand. A student fit to be a public speaker should know all about "Kim", "The Crisis", "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", and "The Growth of the Soil", even though he may never have heard of the Elsie Books or the Alger Books or the Rover Boys. A student in a speech class who confuses John Burroughs with Edgar Rice Burroughs should be "flunked" for the day.

We do not urge beginners to read the dictionary from cover to cover as though it were a continued story; but we do insist that a Webster's or Standard or Oxford Concise dictionary is a very important part of the speaker's laboratory equipment. A Freshman told his oral English instructor at the end of the second term, "This course has already been worth the price of admission. You made me buy a good dictionary. I resented you and the book too, at first; now I've decided to remember you in my will by leaving you an edition of 1980." The instructor chose to take the remark as a compliment. Ten minutes a day with the dictionary should, during the four college years, help to build up a vocabulary as large and useful as was Shakespere's. A student should never pass over a word used in a text or by a lecturer unless he understands its

meaning. In his own manuscripts and upon the platform he should develop the power to use not the approximately right word or phrase but the expression which is exactly right.

Encyclopedias are in the same class with dictionaries and in a class above also. Sometimes a dictionary leads one on to the consultation of a more complete reference work. If a student speaker can lay hands on the latest editions of The Encyclopedia Britannica, The Encyclopedia Americana, The Catholic Encyclopedia, and Winston's or Nelson's Cumulative Loose-Leaf Encyclopedia he can afford to have access to few "advanced books" and authoritative "last words".

For a college student who wishes to concentrate in speech work or for speech occasions in some chosen field, no better discipline is possible than for him to bury himself in thorough studies of the histories of all nations, in the natural and physical and social sciences, and in the philosophies of all races. This might suggest that we believe. little public performance should be offered until the Junior or the Senior years. We would waive our right to com

ment. We have known Eton and Harrow and Westminster boys who have come up to Oxford and Cambridge more satisfactorily sophisticated than are average American university graduates. The twin sons of a famous American poet, lads who had been partly educated in Switzerland, could when they were twelve years old converse or lecture with more charm, authority and enthusiasm on the old masters than they could when they passed their college entrance examinations.

Project. Fancy that the Leprechauns are going to leave a pot of gold beside your alarm clock tonight, but that you must spend it at your college co-operative society only for books published not later than 1900 A.D. Give a talk for a course in Comparative Literature on the books which

you will buy. Your talk should have appropriate literary qualities and a delicacy or lightness of touch.

2. Remove Thy Sandals, For The Ground Whereon Thou Treadest Is Holy Ground.

Some of us enter an educated man's library as though we were approaching the nave of a temple. If you can tell what a man is able to do by finding out what he eats, you can determine rather well what a man is by what he reads. A Scotch scholar who had lived gracefully his three score years had on the shelves of his study near the campus of the University of Chicago a few thousand copies of the classics of all times and races. He was partly blind, but since he knew his books almost by heart, even in twilight he could get up from his chair during a discussion over some controversial subject, with about six steps and one arm movement find the very book he wanted, and in thirty seconds be reading word for word the quotation which he had been repeating during the discussion. He seldom left his room, but disciples were always at hand during the evening hours. He was never lonely. As a speaker, although his address was with only delicate emotional intensity and animated by few physical gestures, intelligent men and women from all sections of the city filled the auditorium whenever he was scheduled to give an address.

If an intelligent inhabitant of another planet should be able to listen to our representative American orators, the comment which he would probably be forced to make would be that they seem to be living out of and for the moment. We tend to forget that "All of the best the Past hath had remains to make our own time glad."

Project. Read one of the popular Outlines which have been appearing during the past ten years: H. G. Wells' "An Outline of History", H. W. Van Loon's "Story of Mankind", John Drinkwater's "Outline of Lit

erature", Thompson's "Outline of Science", Charles Francis Potter's "Outline of Religions", or even Carl Sandberg's "American Songbag". Cover a blackboard. with line drawings, and tell your story. You will need to speak swiftly and vigorously in order to cover 10,000 years' development within a half hour.

1. Yesterday Is Only A Memory And Tomorrow Is Only A Vision; But Today Is Life, The Very Life Of

Life.

The most popular newspaper column in this Country is Arthur Brisbane's "Today". The fastest growing weekly newsmagazine is "Time". Only news of the last twelve. hours "makes" the front page of the newspapers. This proves nothing in a qualitarian sense; but it indicates that we Americans are living for the moment. Our roots are

not sunk deep into the soil of our native haunts. Our average life span is longer than that of our ancestors; but it is fast and furious; if not a short life, it is a gay one. We may not stamp contemporary tendencies with the seal of our august approval; but we must recognize "things as they are". If we aspire to be appealing public speakers, we must realize that illustrations taken from the common life of 1928 will be more helpful in a speech to an audience of, say, members of the Chamber of Commerce or of a Parents-Teachers Association than will quotations from Plato's "Republic" or "The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius".

Reasonably complete information for the purposes of an address today includes the last edition of a metropolitan newspaper. Beacon Hill residents subscribe to the morning Herald, the evening Transcript, and the American (for Brisbane's column, and possibly for some of the