(f) Translate the following familiar phrases: "Ecce homo," "bona fide,' "ne plus ultra,' non compos mentis," and "finis.'

COMPOSITION AND RHETORIC.

I.

(a) Write any two of the following, viz: Receipt, Order, Due Bill, Note, Check, Draft, Bill of Acct., Bill of Mdse.

(b) Define Pleonasm, Redundancy, Tautology and Circumlocution.

II.

(a) Correct the errors in the following sentences, and state what rule of rhetoric is violated in each:

(1) It is our duty to ease the distress of others, by appeasing their sorrows, alleviating their fears and allaying their resentments.

(2) A couple of young ladies demeaned themselves by entering a saloon.

(3) Your uncle was evidently laboring under some hallucination.

tion.

(4) When I call he always inquires for you.

(5) They seemed to nearly dressed alike.

(6) Give five rules for the use of the capital letter.

III.

(a) Name and define three requisites to good composi

(b) Define "Personification," "Allegory," "Unity," and "Phraseology."

(b) Give two examples each of "metaphor," "simile,” “metonomy," and distinguish between an allegory, parable and fable.

V.

Write a composition of twenty lines upon any of the following named subjects, viz: (N. B. One credit off for each error in Capitalization, Punctuation, Orthography and wrong Grammatical construction.)

(1) "Our First Woman President."

(2) "An Involuntary Descent into a Volcano."

(3) "A tour on the Flying Dutchman."

(4) "A Day with a Mermaid under the sea."

(5) "The Chinaman's First Impression of an Italian

Opera."

(5) "A Day with Adam and Eve in Eden."

(7) "The Schoolmaster in The Deserted Village.' (8) "The Watched Pot never Boils."

(9) Would it be an Advantage or a Disadvantage if the Philosopher's Stone should be Discovered?”

(10) "Do circumstances make Great Men, or Do Great Men make Circumstances?"

(11) "The World owes Me a Living."

(12) "Your Favorite Candidate for the Presidency."

REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING HISTORY.

BY PROF. GRANVILLE F. FOSTER.

History is by no means a mere statement of past events, an array of dry facts and dates, an account of the pomp and tyranny of kings, a record of battles and sieges, court intrigues and the like. It is far more than this. To comprehend with any degree of entirety and fullness the events of any particular epoch, it is necessary to arise above the act to the motive that prompted it; to go behind the scenes, so to speak, and gain there some knowledge of those subtle social forces which, upon the actual stage of life, have been so pɔtent in molding tribes, nationalities, communities, and have paved the way for, and made possible, the advent of great men. To set forth intelligently and interestingly, with care and correctness, the history of any nation or epoch is by no means any slight task; and he who would aspire to do this has before him much painstaking study and research, even if he be an adept in the use of language and a master of what is elegant in style. Ere he applies his pen to the task of writing, he must enquire assiduously into the origin of the people whose history he purposes to present; must study their mental and physical characteristics, and all the modifications which these have from time to time undergone from forces acting from within and from those acting from without. He must examine carefully the development and growth of their language and literature, and trace these from their crude beginnings on upwards to their highest

pitch of excellence and thence downwards to their decline. He must make researches into their customs and manners, and must even study the physical features—the face of the country, the soil, the climate of the region which they occupied or occupy-since it is undoubted that these do have by no means a small and insignificant effect in shaping and molding the physical, mental and social qualities of a people. Then, too, the historian who endeavors to set forth the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, cannot for one moment ignore the great and important fact that, lying back of all the forces of the social world, as well as back of those of the physical world, there is a living, intelligent, acting First Great Cause-a God from whose divine and infinite energy all force emanates and with whose energy all force is correlated. To ignore a God in history, and to relegate all historical events to the blind, meaningless, uncaused laws of sociology, seems to the writer to require more credulity than to believe with the ancient astrologers that in some mysterious way the destinies of every man are in the keeping of the heavenly bodies, and that these latter do sometimes reveal the former by the relative positions which they may assume on some critical night in the man's life. In short, the true historian is solicitous to breathe into his works the very breath of life—to make his pictures so vivid, his delineations of character so true to nature, that his readers cannot help, for the time being, living amid the scenes he describes; and in just so far as he succeeds in doing this will his readers be benefited and instructed, as well as interested, in what he has to say to them.

Now there is nothing that the historian must do in order to interest and instruct his readers but the teacher

of history must do in order to interest and instruct his classes. Indeed, the task of the latter is often complicated by the fact that he must sometimes endeavor to instruct unwilling, and therefore uninterested, students, while the historian, communicating knowledge through the medium of the written page, speaks to willing listeners only.

It cannot be expected that the average schoolboy will ever become interested in the dry details of events and dates, in long tables of kings, emperors, presidents and the like; in prolix lists of battles, with the enumeration of the exact number killed, wounded and missing—all of which occupy so many pages of a large number of the text-books on history in use in our public schools, while there is often an entire exclusion from their pages of all those spicy anecdotes, those lively, vivid descriptions of persons, places, conventions, conflicts, which make such works as the larger histories by Bancroft, Lossing, Macaulay, Froude, etc., so very entertaining and at the same time so very instructive. Not only is the average school text-book of history faulty, because of the absence of story and anecdote, but it is often defective in not giving the history of the people. Scrupulously exact and minute in describing every battle, however insignificant-faithful in tracing the ancestry of kings-one fails to find in them any picture of social life and customs, any account of the peculiarities of language and literature; in short, any attempt to show how man appeared, or does appear, in the middle and lower walks of life. Is it not true that many of the treatises of history for school purposes proceed on the principle "that the world was made for Cæsar," and are thus often fitted to give, with, however, not a tithe of the pleasure afforded, as false a view of life as may be gained from the perusal of the average work of fiction?