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among her elder teaching sisters in my classes time and again. Our American college girl has come to stay; and I hope she will stay. She is able, tractable and earnest in her work, and gets full value out of what she undertakes. She does not play so hard as her brother and is more ready to accept what is told her; and occasionally will overwork—a thing that no healthy boy ever does. I am not unaware that much criticism has been recently current as to our awful young people" and the incorrigibility of their ways. Measurably cloistered as I am, I do not much observe these dreadful things, and I have long since learned not to believe quite all that I hear. In one respect the easy social camaraderie among our boys and girls, as contrasted with the age of the chaperon, is a return to Elizabethan conditions which exemplify as for example do the comedies of Shakespeare an ease and naturalness in conduct among young people far wholesomer and sounder morally than that of the generations of gallantry and sentimentalism. I am personally an admirer of the Elizabethan type of heroine who, like Rosalind in As You Like It, or Beatrice who did for Benedick, is quite able to take care of herself and, at need, of the affairs of others, her friends, mere men like lovers, fathers and the like, about her. And I am glad to welcome her reincarnation in our new generation. But whether we like it or not they are ours, these young people, God bless them, or rather, we are theirs.

I am a stubborn optimist as to this America of ours. We are as yet, with all our stature, young, crass, want

ing in tact, and not wholly civilized; but the greatest of all adventures is ours: ours is a country of opportunity, where all men — as yet, who are not brown - are welcome, where an unbounded generosity rules in our hearts despite all the predatory instincts of business, and disordered ideals of a disinterested leadership of the world still haunt our minds despite our massacre of our prophets. Much as I wish that some genius could devise for human government a means by which we might unerringly discover the veritable leaders among us to replace somehow this haphazard submission of the state to conditions of bickering and delay under which no one could run a peanut-stand successfully for a month, I am yet a devout believer in the common man and his everyday wife and in the sense, the sobriety, the judgment, more, the hopes and the aspirations, that are his and equally hers. In the tide of English life that first started the current of ours, there was first overweighted Puritanism, with its preoccupations with the horrors of the world to come and its effort to make this world anticipate them. This sort of Puritanism has for the most part sunk to the bottom of its own excessive weight. Secondly there was the careless, godless, thriftless spirit of the Cavalier. This has floated off for the most part on the surface, like a volatile oil, turning things about it for a moment to the colors of the rainbow, if fouling the surface. What remains in our American life is a strong, moving tide, able to carry on its bosom proud argosies, to tend ever onward, purifying as it flows, whatever the tributary streams that trouble its course for the mo

ment, and tinge the clearness of its waters. With our experiment in free government a success, the world turns over a new page. Why then, O why, do we still shrink, and tremble to assume the moral, the spiritual, the intellectual leadership which is ours?

NOTE

1. Expanded from a paper read at the meeting of the Modern Language Association, December 1912. Abstract, Publications of that Society, xxviii, 1913.

II. A Review, The Gownsman, 1920.

III. Reprinted from University of Pennsylvania Public Lectures, vii, 141, 1921.

IV. Expanded from a Review in The New York Evening Post, iii, 5, 1922.

V. Rewritten from Publications of the Modern Language Association, xiii, 221, 1898.

VI. Reprinted from A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, London, 1916; also reprinted in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, iv, 471, 1916.

VII. Address before the Tudor and Stuart Club of Johns Hopkins University, reprinted in The Graduate Magazine of the same, September, 1923.

VIII. Reordered from The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, lxx, 141, 1922.

IX. Reprinted from A Book of Seventeenth Century Lyrics, 1899. (With kind permission of Messrs. Ginn & Co.)

X. Revised from Modern Philology, i, 31, 1903.

XI. Address before the English Speaking Union of Washington, D. C., April 24, 1926.

XII. Address before the Pennsylvania Historical Society, March, 1924.