thought and best work of France and Germany and Italy.
And in all your studies let the two great essentials, reading and writing, go hand in hand. Clarify your impressions by transferring them to paper. They may never be of value to anyone else, but they will be of inestimable service to you, as milestones of your own progress. "Of late years," wrote Trollope at the close of his Autobiography, "I have found my greatest pleasure in our old English dramatists, not from excessive love of their work, but from curiosity in searching their plots and examining their character. If I live a few years longer, I shall, I think, leave in my copies of these dramatists, down to the close of James I., written criticisms on every play." In Zola's published Lettres de Jeunesse, letters written between the ages of twenty and twenty-two, the chief interest centres in their testimony of the
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