happy, and have endeavored to establish credit for all such contributions.

This book is therefore an elementary or working handbook to Macbeth; and since this play is presumably in most instances the best masterpiece with which to begin the study of literary art, the aim has been to make it an introductory manual to Shakespeare at large, whether in secondary schools, colleges, clubs, or private study. It is planned to furnish all the helps necessary for such a purpose. Later and somewhat specialistic study of Macbeth will call for the Variorum edition of Mr. Furness and indeed some knowledge of Elizabethan and earlier English. This book does not pretend to condense the Variorum, or do the student's eventual philologizing for him.

It would seem chiefly desirable in teaching Macbeth and similar literature that no æsthetic meanings should be told the learner, and that he should be forced to find all essential ones before leaving the work. Hence the opinions of critics, as likely to hinder the independent perceptions and judgments of the pupil, have been excluded from this manual. The artistic meaning of a passage in Shakespeare is as much a problem as anything in physics. or mathematics, and must be accepted and treated as such by both instructor and learner. It is scarcely to be denied that we have been depriving students in English quite materially of their rights, much as teachers of Algebra would do if they enforced, by editing matter from the "key" into their text-books, the solution of every exercise upon the student's attention before it was fairly stated, or as if teachers of Vergil and Homer should expect their students to use interlinear editions only. We have undoubtedly encouraged our pupils to appropriate other and maturer judgments than theirs, by way

of memory, instead of developing their own. The lessons here, except now and then in the way of a hint to imagination, tell the student nothing, but shape each art device and aspect of the play into a task which the pupil is permitted and as far as possible encouraged to work out for himself.

Accordingly, respecting the outline analyses appended to this edition, it is not believed that any argument or apology is necessary. The general use of the author's Shakespeare Questions, in another form, throughout the country, and the demand for text-books that shall along with the usual notes and other helps include them, seem sufficient justification for this feature. They have been used, much in the shape here given, in the classes of the author for a dozen years or more, and differ from the questions often found in school-books mainly in asking nothing that can be found literally in the text or elsewhere, and in involving discussion of principal points. Teachers who have no interest in the artistic construction of the play, or in its ethic meaning, will easily leave them aside as they pursue their own modes of administering Shakespeare's educational power. The Questions are in part inductive, in part Socratic, and in part merely present the given difficulty in an analyzed and logical form, that the pupil may go at work upon something definite and tangible.

No parallel passages from other literature have been included. The introduction of these is good for those whose taste has been developed. The aim of this work is to enable the development of such taste; and literary quotations, as experience has shown, are not likely to be much prized by the junior student. As far as possible source matter has been introduced and utilized for assisting the impressions of the learner. It has everywhere

been borne in mind that there can hardly be worse pedagogy than to assume the accomplishment, at the outset, of the very thing the proposed study is to achieve or enable, and address the student as if he had already discerned the qualities and message of his author. Apparently nothing has done more to retard literary education than this mistake.

I must not omit acknowledgment of the help derived from the compendious Variorum of Mr. Furness, without which the preparation of even such an edition as this one would have been, at least for the present editor, a laborious and costly undertaking. When I have quoted expounders accessible only in the Variorum, I have signified my indebtedness to that volume. I have profited considerably from other authorities and studies difficult to acknowledge, and have adopted some suggestions of my colleague, Professor Ansley, who has taught the play in my stead for several years.

LINCOLN, September 5, 1899.

L. A. SHERMAN.