A COMPLAINT ABOUT ENGLISH VII.

EDITORS DAILY CRIMSON.- It is with great reluctance that I venture to question the action of a prominent and learned professor in his teaching of one of the most popular courses in the college curriculum. I would not deem it right to speak of the matter, if the action of another professor during the first half year in the same course had not been so diametrically opposed to the present method of teaching. The course in English VII. purposes to give those who elect it a view of English literature during the eighteenth century. The plan pursued during the first half year kept this idea steadily in view, and the course of lectures proved to be one of the most instructive and exhaustive that could be expected. Several prominent authors were considered, and the students exhibited great interest in the work of the course. The work of the second half year has struck a rock in the person of "Old Dr. Johnson." For there weeks the course has been restricted to a microscopic, hypercritical examination of the "Vanity of Human Wishes." When it is remembered that the course meets but once a week, the expenditure of valuable time can be realized. English VII. is essentially, and, to be successful, must necessarily be made a lecture course. Its rare meeting, the vast amount of work to be accomplished in it, and the great size of the section demand this. When three weeks are given to one short poem of Johnson in a course which both in recitation and examination neglects the works of Addison through a lack of time, that poem should possess a higher literary value than any poetry that Dr. Samuel Johnson ever wrote. The work of English VII. is intended to examine the authors of a century. That century covered the lives of such writers as Swift, Addison, Steele, Young, Thomson, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollet, of whom no notice has been taken in the work of the course. While the great beauty and grandeur of the "Vanity of Human Wishes" is very striking, we question if the poem merits, to the exclusion of many other notable literary works, the amount of study which has been given it.