tion. For instance, the following paragraph from Bryce's American Commonwealth presents an exposition of the term "the general education of the American people"; that is, it sets forth that term for the purpose of increased clearness of apprehension.

The Americans are an educated people, compared with the whole mass of the population in any European country except Switzerland, parts of Germany, Iceland, and Scotland; that is to say, the average of knowledge is higher, the habit of reading and thinking more generally diffused, than in any other country. (I speak, of course, of the native Americans, excluding negroes and recent immigrants.) They know the Constitution of their own country, they follow public affairs, they join in local government and learn from it how government must be carried on, and in particular how discussion must be conducted in meetings, and its results tested in elections. The Town Meeting has been the most perfect school of self-government in any modern country. In villages, they still exercise their minds on theological questions, debating points of Christian doctrine with no small acuteness. Women, in particular, though their chief reading is fiction and theology, pick up at the public schools and from the popular magazines far more miscellaneous information than the women of any European country possess, and this naturally tells on the intelligence of the men.1

The systematic and orderly character of the expository method as illustrated in this paragraph will be apparent from a glance at the skeleton that underlies the selection:

GENERAL EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

I. Comparison with education among Europeans. II. General information among Americans.

1 From The American Commonwealth. Copyright, 1894. Used by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company.

A. On political matters.

1. Knowledge of the Constitution.
2. Familiarity with public affairs.
3. Knowledge of self government.

Participation in government, public discus-
sions, etc.

B. On theological matters.

Frequent discussions of doctrinal questions,

III. Unusual intelligence of American women.

A. General reading.

1. Fiction and theology.

2. Current magazine literature.

B. Public school education.

C. Influence on men.

From this outline it is clear that the function of the passage in question is to set forth the coördination and subordination of the various constituent elements that enter into the scope of the term under consideration. After reading the paragraph one understands more clearly what constitutes the "general education of the American people," what the writer means by the term.

The entire work from which the paragraph is selected, The American Commonwealth itself, presents a more complete and typical example of the expository method. It is, in fact, but an elucidation of the term indicated by the title; it considers the subject in all of its essential component parts state and national government, political parties, social organization, etc., etc. Narration, on the other hand, were it directed at the same subject, would note the chronological order of successive events, and would produce a history of the United States. Bryce is an expositor; Fiske, a narrator.

Matthew Arnold's famous essay, Sweetness and Light, is another example of the expository method. It ex

pounds the term "culture," defines it, analyzes it, differentiates it from the antonym "Philistinism," or modern materialism, and all for greater clearness of comprehension on the part of the reader.

Silas Marner has already been used as an illustration of the narrative method. Were a critic to discuss "the regeneration of the weaver of Raveloe" from the expository point of view, he would endeavor to explain the fitness of the word "regeneration" as applied to Silas's peculiar spiritual experiences. Upon completing the exposition, a reader, - presumably already familiar with the narrative of Marner's life,—would be satisfied that the term had been fitly applied.

But all writing that has for its aim to set forth a term needing explanation is not of necessity so unmistakably expository as might seem to be the case from the examples just cited. Exposition has many methods, and among them narration sometimes plays a part, as in the following paragraph from The Mountains of California by John Muir. The subject is the life history of a mountain lake.

When a mountain lake is born, when, like a young eye, it first opens to the light, it is an irregular, expressionless crescent, enclosed in banks of rock and ice, bare, glaciated rock on the lower side, the rugged snout of a glacier on the upper. In this condition it remains for many a year, until at length, toward the end of some auspicious cluster of seasons, the glacier recedes beyond the upper margin of the basin, leaving it open from shore to shore for the first time, thousands of years after its conception beneath the glacier that excavated its basin. The landscape, cold and bare, is reflected in its pure depths; the winds ruffle its glassy surface, and the sun fills it with throbbing spangles, while its waves begin to lap and murmur around its leafless shores, sun spangles during the day

and reflected stars at night its only flowers, the wind and the snow its only visitors. Meanwhile, the glacier continues to recede; and numerous rills, still younger than the lake itself, bring down glacier-mud, sand-grains, and pebbles, giving rise to margin-rings and plats of soil. To these fresh soil-beds comes many a waiting plant — first, a hardy carex with arching leaves and a spike of brown flowers; then, as the seasons grow warmer, and the soil-beds deeper and wider, other sedges take their appointed places; and these are joined by blue gentians, daisies, dodecatheons, violets, honeyworts, and many a lowly moss. Shrubs also hasten in time to the new gardens, — kalmia with its glossy leaves and purple flowers, the arctic willow, making soft woven carpets, together with the heathy bryanthus and cassiope, the fairest and dearest of them all. Insects now enrich the air; frogs pipe cheerily in the shallows, soon followed by the ousel, which is the first bird to visit the glacier lake, as the sedge is the first of plants.

So the young lake grows in beauty, becoming more and more humanly lovable from century to century. Groves of aspen spring up, and hardy pines, and the hemlock spruce, until it is richly overshadowed and embowered. But while its shores are being enriched, the soil-beds creep out with incessant growth, contracting its area while the lighter mud-particles deposited on the bottom cause it to grow constantly shallower, until at length the last remnant of the lake vanishes, - closed forever in ripe and natural old age.1

It might seem at first that this passage is narrative, but a little consideration will show that the writer's ultimate purpose is not to tell a story about a mountainlake; rather it is to elucidate the geologic process of lake formation, and for this elucidation he chooses the narrative form for its greater dramatic effect. That is, he uses narrative means for the better accomplishment of an

1 From The Mountains of California, by John Muir. By permission of The Century Co.

expository end. So with all passages of this character, in which the question may arise, Is it narration (expository) or exposition (narrative)? we have but to determine the ultimate purpose of the composition in question.

In determining this essential point it is sometimes of assistance to discover whether the passage under consideration deals with particular, individual events, of value in and for themselves, or whether they are general, typical of the entire class to which they belong. For example, contrast the following paragraph from Macaulay's History of England with that already cited from Muir:

But the king suffered the auspicious moment to pass away; and it never returned. In August, 1643, he sate down before the city of Gloucester. That city was defended by the inhabitants and by the garrison, with a determination such as had not, since the commencement of the war, been shown by the adherents of the Parliament. The emulation of London was excited. The train-bands of the City volunteered to march wherever their forces might be required. A great force was speedily collected, and began to move westward. The siege of Gloucester was raised. The Royalists in every part of the kingdom were disheartened: the spirit of the Parliamentary party revived; and the apostate Lords, who had lately fled from Westminster to Oxford, hastened back from Oxford to Westminster.

As forms of composition these two passages are wholly unlike. Each is constructed, indeed, on the narrative principle; in each we have the orderly recital of the details that constitute a transaction, the one "The life-story of a mountain lake," the other "The siege of Gloucester," -but in the selection from Macaulay the details are specific and particular in that they apply to an episode of the Civil War, to the siege of a certain city in 1643, not to wars and sieges in general; whereas the