Are we to understand, then, someone will ask, that the English courses in colleges and graduate schools are a waste of time? Emphatically no, not by any means, so long as we do not mistake the nature of their help. So far as they go they are of distinct value to a student with ambition for authorship—valuable in the same way that courses in literature and foreign languages are valuable; but they carry him no further in his technical training than college courses in biology or constitutional history carry a student forward in the practice of medicine or the law.
Professor A. S. Hill, whose English courses are a pleasant memory to Harvard men of the older generation, wrote pessimistically only a few years ago, in a little volume entitled Our English:
Under the most favourable conditions, the results of English composition as practiced in college are, it must be confessed, discouraging.
